ABSTRACT
The word “Alchemy,” i.e. the “Black Art,” or rather the “magical craft of the Black Country,” is derived from one of the names of Northern Egypt, which was called the “Black Country ” because of the brownish-black colour of the soil in the Delta, as opposed to the “Red Country,” which was given to Upper Egypt because of its reddish-yellow sand. We might thus think that Egypt was the oldest home of divination known to us, but such is not the case, for the literature of Egypt contains neither mention nor allusion to any of the numerous kinds of divination which were practised in Sumer and Akkad in the third millennium B.c. Until the Ptolemaïc period divination by earth, air, fire, and water was practically unknown among the indigenous peoples of the country, and there is little doubt that they only became acquainted with these branches of the art of Magic through the Greeks who borrowed many of their magical practices from the Babylonians. That Joseph used the divining cup does not prove that divining by water, or wine, or oil was common in Egypt, for Joseph was a Hebrew and his people borrowed the art from the Babylonians.
