The tongues of stones: diversity of interlocutions in Arabic alchemical writings

Dialogues and interlocutions in Arabic alchemical writings have already attracted the attention of several researchers. These previous studies mainly focused on dialogues composed in the classical form of alchemical writings, which are interlocutions between a master of alchemy and his disciple. The teaching dialogue between Zosimos and his disciple Theosebeia in the (“The Book of Pictures”) can be regarded as one of the most influential examples. This paper focuses instead on the diversity of interlocutions that appear in alchemical writings with regard to their literary construction as well as their characters and what they represent. For this research, extracts from different alchemical writings will serve as examples: (“The Boasting of Stones”) and an excerpt from (“The Book of the Garden”), both attributed in the manuscripts to the Andalusian mathematician Maslama al-Majrīṭī, in addition to an excerpt from (“The Book of the Seven Climes”) ascribed to al-Sīmāwī, and a poem of seventy verses – – by an unknown author. This paper aims to explore how Arabic-writing alchemists made use of a versatile repertoire of literary and didactic methods to transfer their knowledge of alchemy to the subsequent generations.