In Alexandria two streams of knowledge met and fused together... The ancient Egyptian industrial arts of metallurgy, dyeing and glass-making... and... the philosophical speculations of ancient Greece, now tinged with ancient mysticismthe result was the "divine" or "sacred" art (...also means sulphur) of making gold of silver.The treatises written in Greek... in Alexandria, are the earliest known books on chemistry.The study of astrology was connected with that of chemistry in the form of an association of the metals with the planets
J. R. Partington