Jabir ibn Hayyan, the « father of written chemistry: myth or reality Le « pere de la chimie ecrite » : JABIR IBN HAYYAN, Mythe ou realite

Summary: All the books dealing with History of Chemistry mention the name of Jabir ibn Hayyan as being the founder of Arabic alchemy. What is called the Jabirian corpus is constituted of a great number of books, but it proved to be necessary to divide these into two different groups. A first part of these books had been redacted directly in Latin language, at the end of the 13 th century or during the 14th century, by authors who used Geber as a pseudonym. The other group of these books had been written during the 8th or the 9th centuries, in Arabic, by a group of Ismaelian followers of Jabir. These works are sufficient to justify Jabir ibn Hayyanʹs position in History of Sciences.