The following selections represent the practical or “exoteric” side of alchemical writing with its exclusive concern for the physical and technical processes required to produce an object or substance or to improve that which is “natural” by means of artifice. Thus the recipes illustrate the close connections between early chemistry and metallurgy, dyeing, jewelry making, writing techniques, and various other crafts. The style is clear, simple, and methodical, vastly different from the highly imagistic allegories of the Dialogue of Cleopatra and the Philosophers and the Visions of Zosimos of Panopolis. If one ignores the persistent uncertainties about substances, measures, and durations of processes, it might be said that here are reasonable examples of technical writing – overlooking, of course, the rather common emphasis on fraud and deception.

Leyden Papyrus X and the Stockholm Papyrus, which bear the names of the cities in which they are deposited, are written in Greek – probably by the same writer – and date from the end of the third century AD. They are, in the words of Earle R. Caley, the translator, “by far the earliest original historical evidence that we have in our possession concerning the nature and the extent of ancient chemical knowledge” (1149). Leyden Papyrus X includes 111 recipes, often written in an “abbreviated, incomplete form such as workers, more or less familiar with the nature of the process, would use” (1150).