To know man you must therefore know God's will. This attitude removes the foundation of scientific curiosity. After Galen there is a thousand years of darkness, and both medicine and biology almost cease to have a history. Men were interested rather in the will and purpose of God than in natural phenomena. Antiquity had a very highly developed and exact technology, but the attempts to rationalize it are lost.
Alexandrian alchemy is very sophisticated and clearly the result of a long evolution.
The surviving texts are all in Greek and carry marks of Christian, Jewish, Neoplatonic, Gnostic, Greek, Egyptian, and perhaps Persian elements. Many names are associated with this strange literature, of which two are worth recording. One is Mary The Jewess , who is still remembered in the steam bath of our laboratories, the bain Marie of French chemists. The other is Zosimus, the first alchemist who can be treated as an historic figure. He flourished about 300 A.D. These Alexandrian al chemical texts contain ideas that persisted to the very dawn of modern chemistry.