Minerals and Metals in Ancient India v1.c26.s8.5

v1.c26.s8.5

In India, the words for brass — *ārakūṭa* and *ritikā* or *riti* — were used in the pre- and post-Christian era. Rasaka stood for calamine ore as well as the sattva or the metal content in it, namely zinc. Madanpāla-Nighaṇṭu of 1374 AD mentioned yaśadam vaṅgasadṛśam or the ‘zinc metal (yaśada) like tin’. Yaśada means that which gives yaśa or fame; the connotation was clear insofar as zinc was known to produce the famous gold-like yellow alloy of brass (vide second-century AD text Rasaratnākara, 1.3). The European word ‘zinc’ was probably derived from yaśada; the Sanskrit word became dastā in several Indian languages. In 1597 Libavius (c. AD 1545-1616) received Indian zinc, which he called ‘Indian or Malabar lead’. He was uncertain what it was. Although Paracelsus (AD 1616) is generally credited to have given the name ‘zinc’ to the metal, the import of the metal from India to the West started only in the seventeenth century, and according to Roscoe (Treatise on Chemistry, Vol. 2, pp. 643-44), the identification of zinc as the metal from blende or calamine was accomplished by Homberg in 1695. (Neogi, 1917, 1979: 47).