1st–3rd century CE · alchemist
Maria the Jewess
Μαρία ἡ Ἑβραία
Known only through Zosimos and later alchemists, who quote her as an authority and credit her with apparatus for distilling and for exposing metals to vapours: the tribikos still and the kerotakis. The bain-marie still bears her name. Her date is uncertain and her Alexandrian setting assumed.
Their life and work
Zosimos calls her one of the ancients and quotes her on apparatus and on the joining of the male and the female in the work; the saying 'one becomes two, two becomes three' is also given to her. The apparatus she is said to have devised, a still with three spouts (the tribikos) and a closed vessel in which metals were exposed to rising vapours (the kerotakis), is described in the manuscripts with drawings. The name 'bain-marie', a water bath, is attested in Latin from the early fourteenth century and in French from the sixteenth; later alchemists took the Mary of the name to be her, long after her time.
That she worked in Alexandria, and in the first centuries CE, is the usual modern assumption. Nothing in the fragments fixes the place or the date. Conjectured
Our device: Their emblem is a three-armed still. No portrait of any of these people survives. The emblems are our devices.
On the shelves
- Maria the Jewess (Maria Hebraea), Writings of Maria the Jewess · before c. 300 CE (often placed 1st-3rd century) · Survives in fragments
In the show
Sources (5)
- M. Mertens (ed. and trans.), Zosime de Panopolis: Mémoires authentiques, Les alchimistes grecs IV.1 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1995)
- R. Patai, The Jewish Alchemists: A History and Source Book (Princeton, 1994)
- L. M. Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)
- Zosimos, On Apparatus and Furnaces in Berthelot–Ruelle, vol. II
- M. Berthelot and C.-É. Ruelle, Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs, 3 vols. (Paris, 1887–1888) (opens in a new tab)