Thinkers Timeline

Jabir ibn Hayyan (c.721-815 CE), known in medieval Europe as Geber, was a scholar of the early Islamic world whose writings on alchemy, chemistry, pharmacy, and metallurgy laid much of the practical foundation of chemical knowledge. His life is poorly documented and many details are uncertain. He is traditionally said to have been born in Tus in Khurasan, in what is now northeastern Iran, to an Arab family of the Azd tribe, and to have worked at the Abbasid court in Baghdad and Kufa under the patronage of the Barmakid family, the powerful viziers of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid. When the Barmakids fell from favour in 803, Jabir reportedly retreated from public life. The scale of the writings attributed to him — several thousand treatises — is far larger than any single person could have produced, and modern scholars now believe that many works under his name were written over two or three centuries by a group of scholars associated with a particular religious and philosophical tradition, possibly the Ismaili branch of Shia Islam. Whether Jabir was a single historical person who founded the tradition, a legendary name used by later writers, or both at once, the Jabirian corpus represents one of the richest bodies of alchemical and chemical writing ever produced. It was translated into Latin from the twelfth century onwards and shaped European alchemy, through which it helped seed the eventual emergence of modern chemistry.