Jabir ibn Hayyan: Contribution a l'histoire des idees scientifiques dans l'Islam

Paul Kraus's Jabir ibn Hayyan, Contribution a l'histoire des idees scientifiques dans l'Islam, published by the Institut francais d'archeologie orientale in Cairo in 1942, is the philological study that established the Jabirian corpus, the vast body of alchemical and scientific texts attributed to the eighth century figure Jabir ibn Hayyan, as the accumulated work of a later school writing across roughly a century, from around 850 to 950 CE, rather than the output of one historical author. Kraus's textual dating has held up in the scholarship since. Its strength is that rigorous, source critical philology, still the starting point for any study of the corpus. Its limit is that Kraus went further and identified the school's authors with Ismaili circles specifically, a further claim that has not held up as well as his dating and should be treated as his own more contested thesis rather than as settled alongside it.