Alchemy: from Arabic “al (the) Khemia (Egyptians).” ALCHEMY: The Science Of BEING
If you yourself have ever spent a moment fascinated or amazed by the great ruins, mysterious Hieroglyphics and cultural advancements of ancient Egypt, you should be able to easily understand why Arabs of the first millenium A.D. considered ‘Egyptology’ (or ‘Alchemy’) to be a science worthy of great minds.
Even in modern Islamic Egypt you will find at least a grudging respect for the ancients who built the Pyramids, Sphinx and other great monuments of dynastic Egypt. There can be little doubt that Arabs of the early centuries A.D. were among the founders of that great revival of Egyptian Studies, which filtered into Europe under the Arabic name of “Alchemy.”
But, even before the Arabs, others had long been involved in an attempt to restore the Sciences of Egypt; and none more diligently than the classical Greeks. By the time Arabic Alchemy reached Europe, it found there an already vast body of studies inspired by the contact between Greece and Egypt, long before ‘the Egyptian Science’ was forgotten by the Egyptians themselves.
Over the next millenium that fusion of Arabic and Greek memories of Egyptian Science would become the western world’s first ‘physical science’ based upon the idea of Experimentation, Proofs and precise Measurements. Today we know that fusion as “chemistry;” which admits (somewhat sheepishly) that it was founded by Alchemists. Like their sister-science Astronomy (which grudgingly admits it’s own origin from within Astrology,) Chemistry today truly ‘owns’ the field of elemental compounds.. Chemistry’s claim that it diverged from ancient Alchemy over the issue of ‘Spiritual forces’ is both absolutely true and furthermore, casts true Alchemy in it’s own proper light.
From: alchemyofthegoddess.com