History

Main article: History of chemistry

See also: Alchemy, Timeline of chemistry, and Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Ancient Egyptians pioneered the art of synthetic "wet" chemistry up to 4,000 years ago.^[19] By 1000 BC ancient civilizations were using technologies that formed the basis of the various branches of chemistry such as; extracting metal from their ores, making pottery and glazes, fermenting beer and wine, making pigments for cosmetics and painting, extracting chemicals from plants for medicine and perfume, making cheese, dying cloth, tanning leather, rendering fat into soap, making glass, and making alloys like bronze.

Democritus' atomist philosophy was later adopted by Epicurus (341–270 BCE).

The genesis of chemistry can be traced to the widely observed phenomenon of burning that led to metallurgy—the art and science of processing ores to get metals (e.g. metallurgy in ancient India). The greed for gold led to the discovery of the process for its purification, even though the underlying principles were not well understood—it was thought to be a transformation rather than purification. Many scholars in those days thought it reasonable to believe that there exist means for transforming cheaper (base) metals into gold. This gave way to alchemy and the search for the Philosopher's Stone which was believed to bring about such a transformation by mere touch.^[20]
Greek atomism dates back to 440 BC, as what might be indicated by the book De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things)^[21] written by the Roman Lucretius in 50 BC.^[22] Much of the early development of purification methods is described by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia.
A tentative outline is as follows: