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Making of Silver from Tutia is a very short alchemical recipe transmitted among the writings of Zosimus of Panopolis, the Egyptian alchemist active around AD 300. It instructs the worker to grind tutia (a zinc-bearing oxide) and unfired sulphur, add the whites of six eggs, and cook the mixture in a flask for two days and nights. A measured amount of the product is then added to copper in a crucible, which, the recipe claims, turns it into silver.
Recipes of this kind form the practical core of Greek alchemy, alongside its speculative and allegorical treatises. They record real workshop materials, weights and procedures, and show how metalworkers aimed to change the colour and appearance of base metals so that copper could pass for silver.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: CAAG II 228 (III.xlvii)). 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).