Library › Greek: Science & Medicine › On Yellowing
On Yellowing is a short alchemical chapter by Zosimus of Panopolis, the Egyptian alchemist active around AD 300, made up of a series of quotations joined by 'and a little later'. Addressed to a woman, it reports that not all practitioners passed at once from whitening to yellowing, since the white composition turns yellow if cooked for long. Others ground yellow divine water in the sun. It ends with the preparation of divine water from two parts lime and one part sulphur, boiled in a pot.
The chapter records the different sequences of operations used by different practitioners, a sign that early alchemy was a varied and argued-over craft. Its excerpted form also shows how Zosimus' works were preserved in selections rather than as whole books.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: CAAG II 208). 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).