Library › Greek: Science & Medicine › On Incombustible Sulfur (Greek Alchemical Corpus)
On Incombustible Sulfur is a brief anonymous recipe from the Greek alchemical corpus, the body of technical and mystical writings on the treatment of metals preserved in Byzantine manuscripts and edited by Marcellin Berthelot and Charles-Émile Ruelle in the Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs (1887–88). Its date is uncertain. In a few lines it tells the reader to grind native sulfur with urine, boil it in brine until it no longer burns, and then combine the result with salt, noting another method that grinds sulfur with lead.
The recipe calls its product "the divine mystery", a play on the Greek word theion, which means both "sulfur" and "divine". Making volatile substances such as sulfur resist the fire is a recurring aim in Greek alchemical recipes. Short workshop texts like this show the practical side of a tradition better known from the allegorical writings of Zosimus and his successors.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions. Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ).