Copper in Ancient India c10.s4.5

c10.s4.5

Though the alchemical works of this century make mention of brass as an alloy, they however, do not definitely state that it was an alloy of zinc. It has only been mentioned as an alloy of zinc in alchemical works of the sixteenth century such as Bhāvaprakash, Dhātukriā and others.⁴ The reason for this is not far to seek. It is owing to the fact that zinc was not generally recognised, as has already been pointed out, as a metal before that century. As has already been mentioned, though Madanpāla was aware of its metallic nature in the fourteenth century, zinc was not universally recognised in India as a metal until the sixteenth century. It may therefore be contended that though brass was distinctly recognised as an alloy in the thirteenth century, it was distinctly recognised as an alloy of zinc in the sixteenth century. Even then India can lay a priority of claim of the discovery of the chemical nature of brass by at least a century, as it was at the end of the seventeenth century only that Kunkel recognised brass as an alloy and Homberg recognised “zinc as the metal from blende.”