The world’s first woman engineer was Jewish

“The first woman engineer in history was a Jewish chemical engineer named Maria who lived two thousand years ago during one of the most intellectually creative periods of ancient times.”

According to Zosimus of Panopoli, the 4th century Greco-Roman authority on Alchemy, the Jews of Hellenistic Egypt originated and spread to Egypt’s early Christian community the concept of Gnosticism. Gnosticism is the view that there is a special kind of spiritual knowledge that can only be obtained by personal experience, a transcendent knowledge that is the only true path to salvation. This notion of a secret, transformative knowledge known only to the initiated, a knowledge that could change what was base into what was precious, would radically alter the direction of ancient chemistry, changing it from what it had been a purely practical pursuit to a mystical mission in which practitioners following arcane formulas attempted to transform base metals into precious ones.

The chief goal of the ancient alchemists, per this expectation of Gnosticism, was to create gold. The trick was to “coax” one material into turning into another by gently guiding it through a series of critical steps. In pursuit of this goal Mariae (or Miriam) the Jewess, a gnostic mystic and “the founding mother of western alchemy” discovered hydrochloric acid and invented three pieces of laboratory equipment — the balneu Mariae, the kerotakis and the tribikos.

To this day the balneu Mariae (Mariae’s bathtub) is used in chemical laboratories worldwide. It is a double boiler. The outer vessel heats water to boiling and the inner vessel is designed to hold a substance meant to be safely heated no higher than that of the outer temperature.

The kerotakis is a device used to heat substances and collect vapors. It was said to be a replication of the process of the formation of gold that occurs in the bowels of the earth.

The tribikos is a still with three arms.

“Zosimus writes that the Jews living in Hellenistic Egypt had learned the technology of chemistry from the Egyptians, but had transformed the science into a mystic art under the tutelage of God. Since there is no trace of alchemy in Jewish tradition prior to the Hellenistic period, we may be justified in attributing its rise to the influence of Hellenistic philosophical thought on Alexandra’s Jews coupled with the influence of the Gnostic tendencies that were then present in Judaism.”

SOURCE OF QUOTED MATERIAL: Stephen Bertman, “The World’s First Woman Engineer”

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first in a series on women scientists.

TOBY ROSSNER (tobyross@cox.net) was the director of media services at the Bureau of Jewish Education from 1978 to 2002.