Library › Greek: Didactic & Technical › On Orichalcum (Greek Alchemical Corpus)
On Orichalcum is a very short anonymous recipe from the Greek alchemical corpus, printed by Berthelot and Ruelle in the Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs (II, p. 390). Its vernacular Greek and an Italian loanword show that it is late Byzantine. It tells the reader to melt copper with Alexandrian tutty, tartar, dung, figs and raisins, repeating the process with fresh ingredients until the copper looks like gold. Saffron, turmeric, honey, egg yolks and ox bile are added for colour.
Tutty is a zinc-bearing material, and treating copper with it produces brass, the gold-coloured alloy that later Greek called orichalcum. The recipe preserves this long-standing metallurgical technique together with the alchemical ambition of making base metal look like gold. Its vocabulary, which includes an Italian-derived verb meaning "repeat", reflects the multilingual world of late Byzantine craftsmen.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: CAAG II 390 (V.xxviii)). 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).