The term "keme", the name of the fertile black soil brought to the banks of the Nile River, at the end of each flood cycle, is the root of both the science chemistry, i.e. chem-istry, and the "kemites", the ancient name of the Egyptians. |
“Egypt, moreover, which has the blackest of soils, they call by the same name as the black portion of the eye, ‘Chemia’, and compare it to a heart; for it is warm and moist and is enclosed by the southern portions of the inhabited world and adjoins them, like the heart in a man's left side.”— Plutarch (100AD), On Isis and Osiris (pg. 83)
In 642, after the fall of Greco-Roman controlled Egyptian empire, the Arabs took over control of the Library of Alexandria, whose books began to be translated into Arabic, through the course of which, amid the Islamic golden age (800AD-1200AD), the Greek name “Chemeia” was re-named “al-kimiya” (alchemy), i.e. “the Egyptian art” or “the black art”, as it was called in the time of Johann Faust (c.1530) who was famed for this science (Partington, 1837). [4] In the century to follow the publication of Robert Boyle’s The Sceptical Chymist (1661), and particularly the publication of Newton’s Query 31 (17818) the term alchemy slowly transformed into chymistry and then chemistry, as the science progressed in refinement.
“The word ‘chemistry’ seems to be of Egyptian origin, and to have been originally equivalent to our phrase natural philosophy in its most extensive sense.”— Thomas Thomson (1820), A System of Chemistry (pg. 3)
“No animosity is shown toward Egypt in the Jewish Scriptures. On the contrary they are favored (Deut. 23: 3-4-, 7-8). The word Chem [keme], the name of the country, is, indeed, attacked in the incident of cHam the son of Noach, but that was evidently on account of the Canaanites, and belongs to the Ezraic policy of exclusiveness.”— Constantine Grethenbach (1902), Secular View of the Bible [2]
“Chemistry implies that the amalgamation of metals was its first occupation, and many see in that form of the word a reference to Chemia, which is, according to Plutarch, an old name of Egypt, in which this amalgamation was first practiced with success. The word druggist came from the drugs he sells.”— James Mitchell (1908), Significant Etymology: Roots, Stems, and Branches of the English Language (pg. 142)
“The art of alchemy was handed down through the centuries from Egypt and Arabia to Greece and Rome, and finally to western and central Europe. The word is derived from the Arabian phrase ‘al-kimia’, which refers to the preparation of the stone or elixir by the Egyptians. The Arabic root ‘kimia’ comes from the Coptic ‘khem’ that alluded to the fertile black soil of the Nile delta. Esoterically and hieroglyphically, the word refers to the dark mystery of the primordial or first matter (the Khem).”— Anon (2013), “What is Alchemy?” (Ѻ), Royal Society of Chemistry, May