Library › Greek: Science & Medicine › The Making of Silver (Greek Alchemical Corpus)
The Making of Silver is a short anonymous recipe from the Greek alchemical corpus, edited by Berthelot and Ruelle. It describes melting lead and tin together, whitening the alloy with vinegar and salt, and adding a little real silver to produce a metal with 'the nature of silver'. A second method treats two kinds of mercury by repeated heating in glass. A closing line ascribes the recipe to 'Solomon the Jew'.
Recipes for imitating or 'multiplying' silver are among the oldest material in Greek alchemy, rooted in the metalworking practices of Graeco-Roman Egypt. This text shows that tradition in miniature, and its ascription to Solomon reflects the legendary authorities to whom such secrets were attributed.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: CAAG II 390 (V.xxvii)). 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).