Abstract
NEARLY twelve years ago, it was mentioned in NATTJBE of October 28, 1922, p. 574 that a well-known Latin alchemical treatise entitled “Epistola Solis ad Lunam Crescentem” was apparently a translation of the Arabic work “Risālatu'l-shams ilā al-hilal (Letter of the Sun to the New Moon by Muhammad ibn Umail al-Tamimi. This suggestion has been confirmed by Messrs. Muhammad Turab Ali, H. E. Stapleton and M. Hidayat Husain, who, in a lengthy and valuable communication to the Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 1–213; 1933), have published the Arabic text of (a) the Risāla, (b) a prose commentary on the Risāla, by the author himself, entitled “Al-mā' al-waraqi wa'l-ard an-najmlyah”(Book of the Silvery Water and Starry Earth), and (c) a further poem of Ibn Umail's, entitled “Al-qasidat an-nūnfyah”(Poem rhyming in Nūn). The edition of the texts is the work of Mr. M. Turab Ali; Messrs. Stapleton and Hidayat Husain contribute an excursus on the date, writings and place in alchemical history of Ibn Umail; an edition, with glossary, of an early medieval Latin rendering of the first half of the Maal-waraqi; and a descriptive index, chiefly of the alchemical authorities quoted by Ibn Umail.
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HOLMYARD, E. Muhammad Ibn Umail: an Early Muslim Alchemist. Nature 133, 937–938 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/133937a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/133937a0