If by the beginning of chemistry we mean the first chemical processes, they started about 400 thousand years after the Big Hot Bang, when the conditions of the young Universe allowed hydrogen atoms to exist (before that the processes of electron binding by protons and ionization processes were in equilibrium, and stable atoms could not exist). Hydrogen atoms began to enter the processes of formation of chemical bonds, forming two-atom molecules H2 and three-atom ions H3+, chemical processes started, and we can say that chemistry began.

If we want to know when chemistry first appeared in human life, it is relatively easy to answer this question: when man made friends with fire. This friendship began when our distant ancestors realized that eating food cooked on fire was better than eating it raw. To do this, they began to deal with the very first chemical processes – first cooking on “wild fires”, then carrying the fire to their homes and keeping the flames in the hearth, well, and then – with the art of making fire. It is possible that even in those times there were those who claimed that fire drives good spirits out of mammoth carcasses, making roasted mammoth meat not as useful as raw, as well as those who said that yams, baked in the coals of an “organic” forest fire tasted better than the same yam baked in the coals of a fire lit by man himself, but then their fate was very sad, for during the Paleolithic the phrase “Don’t like it, don’t eat it! ” was tantamount to the phrase “Die of hunger!”

Digging through sources and chronicles, we can even find a candidate for the role of “the world’s first chemist” whose name history has preserved. Incidentally, it would be more correct to say “whose name”. A Mesopotamian cuneiform tablet dating from the thirteenth century B.C. mentions a certain Tapputi Belatekalim, the last word being neither a surname nor a family name, but a position – the overseer of the female half of the royal palace. When not in charge of the female half of the palace, Tapputi was engaged in chemical experiments in the field of perfumery.

Judging by the tablet, Tapputi, heated, isolated fragrant extracts of flowers, mixed different essences, diluted the resulting mixtures with water in various ratios, persistently and repeatedly repeating all these steps until the result began to satisfy her. It is possible that the clay tablet telling of the Tapputi is also the first documented description of what we now call the chemical process of “distillation” – the extraction of extracts, which requires initial heating and subsequent cooling of the vapors.

The hardest part, oddly enough, is figuring out who first coined the term “chemistry,” denoting with it the science we are already familiar with. This is a shame, especially if we remember that the copyright for the term “physics” belongs to Aristotle (although, of course, Alexander the Great’s mentor and philosopher called “physics” far from what we are used to considering physics now), the term “biology” was introduced by Jean-Baptiste Chevalier de Lamarck.

One can often find the idea that chemistry is a reduction of alchemy, which comes from the Arabic ءايميخ (‘al-kīmiyā’). To a certain extent this is true – European alchemy blossomed on the soil prepared by Persian and Arab alchemists. However, the development of Near Eastern alchemy was preceded by the emergence of what we call “Alexandrian alchemy”, which would probably be more correctly called “Romanian chemistry”: the first attempts to deal with chemistry as a science rather than as a ritual were made not only in the “scientific capital” of Byzantium – Alexandria, but also in its other cities […]. Thus, the formation of chemistry as a science rather than a ritualized craft begins on Byzantine lands, and the first chemists about whom there is any mention in the sources of that time can be considered representatives of the Alexandrian alchemical (or Romean chemical) school – Zosimus of Panopolitans and Maria Procica.

More is known about Zosimus of Panopolitans, who lived at a later time. This philosopher was born at the beginning of the 4th century AD in the city of Panopolis in the territory of the Eastern Roman Empire […]. Zosimus was the author of the very first manual of practical chemistry, which has come down to us both in the original and in translations.

Written in Greek, the work was called Hirokmeta (Greek for made by hand). Zosimus “Hirokmeta” and later works of four tens of authors, dated mainly to V-VI centuries A.D., in VII-VIII centuries, were united and reproduced by Constantinople scribes in the first “collective monograph” on chemistry, which influenced the development of alchemy (in VII-VIII – already alchemy) both in the West and in the East. Fragments of this manuscript can now be seen in museums in Paris and Venice.