Tagging Alchemic texts. Issues in Corpora and Analysis

The article begins with a brief presentation of the Arabic Alchemic tradition. An historical excursus and a comparaison with the Greek tradition is also provided in order to set the arab studies about the Great Work in their time and cultural context. Some characteristics of the Arabic tradition are pointed out to underline its peculiarity. Afterwards I tried to sketch out the life and personality of Ǧābir Ibn Ḥayyān. I also wanted to arise the consciousness about the fact that this author may not have been the one and only writer of the so-called ǧābirian corpus. I have then described the corpus, its lexicals –such the multi-layering of meaning of the words used- and structural features – e.g. the hypertextuality. I also tried to gather most of the edited texts so to give the reader a general view of the vastity of the corpus. Finally some considerations about the utility of the alchemic corpus in the Thesaurus Linguae Arabicae are shown together with comments and suggestion about the final aim of this project.