This Ancient scientist was championed by intellectuals across time, and by the 1600s was known in Europe as one of the most important alchemists of Ancient history: Cleopatra “Chrysopoeia” the Alchemist (aka not the Pharaoh).
Thought to have been active in the third century BCE, Cleopatra was praised in the early 1600s as being one of only four women who knew how to create the “philosopher’s stone” (thought to have been able to turn base metals into silver or gold, or even to grant immortality). The painting of Cleopatra on the left is by the 17th-century Italian artist Lavinia Fontana.
There is a second century CE text that historians call the “Dialogue of Cleopatra,” and although it was written in the first two centuries CE, it purports to be a conversation between eager male alchemy students asking Cleopatra questions about her craft. They clearly hold the scientist and her knowledge in great reverence — one of them tells her that “in thee is concealed a strange and terrible mystery. Enlighten us, casting your light upon the elements.” Cleopatra goes on to enumerate how the ecology of plants parallels the distillation process in alchemy and how human birth is akin to the creation of the philosopher’s stone. Even if she didn’t actually come up with these ideas, the fact that the leading scientists of the Ancient world thought she did shows how much Cleopatra was esteemed.
Even more interesting is the right-hand image, a folio from the surviving writings of Cleopatra (“Cleopatra Chrysopoeia,” or “Cleopatra the gold-making” is in Greek on the top left corner). It is her most important extant work, and all these doodles had enormous significance. For instance, the ouroboros in the bottom left with the snake eating its own tail refers to the unity of opposites. To the right of that is an apparatus of two circles joined by a long tube, an instrument known as an alembic. Used in the distillation process, it was a critical device in the development of the field of chemistry, and Cleopatra the Alchemist invented it.
Source(s): Liana de Girolami Cheney, “Lavinia Fontanta’s ‘Cleopatra the Alchemist'”, _Journal of Literature and Art Studied_, August 2018, vol 8, number 8, pp 1-22. “ANONYMOUS: (first or second century AD): Dialogue of Cleopatra and the Philosophers” Cambridge UP Oct 2014, chapter five of _The Alchemy Reader: from Hermes Trismegistus to Issac Newton_. Codex Marcianus graecus (MS 299 X-XII)
