The Emerald Tablet, also known as the Smaragdine Tablet or the Tabula Smaragdina (Latin, from the Arabic: , Lawḥ al-zumurrudh), is a compact and cryptic Hermetic text. It was highly regarded by Islamic and European alchemists as the foundation of their art. Though attributed to the legendary Hellenistic figure Hermes Trismegistus, the text of the Emerald Tablet first appears in a number of early medieval Arabic sources, the oldest of which dates to the late eighth or early ninth century. It was translated into Latin several times in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Numerous interpretations and commentaries followed. Medieval and early modern alchemists associated the Emerald Tablet with the creation of the philosophers' stone and the artificial production of gold. It has also been popular with nineteenth and twentieth century occultists and esotericists, among whom the expression "as above, so below" (a modern paraphrase of the second verse of the Tablet) has become an often cited motto. Textual history The tablet states its author as Hermes Trismegistus ("Hermes the Thrice-Greatest"), a legendary Hellenistic combination of the Greek god Hermes and the ancient Egyptian god Thoth. Like most other works attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the Emerald Tablet is very hard to date with any precision, but generally belongs to the late antique period (between c. 200 and c. 800). The oldest known source of the text is the Sirr al-khalīqa wa-ṣanʿat al-ṭabīʿa (The Secret of Creation and the Art of Nature, also known as the Kitāb al-ʿilal or The Book of Causes), an encyclopedic work on natural philosophy falsely attributed to Apollonius of Tyana (c. 15–100, Arabic: Balīnūs or Balīnās). This book was compiled in Arabic in the late eighth or early ninth century, but it was most likely based on (much) older Greek and/or Syriac sources. In the frame story of the Sirr al-khalīqa, Balīnūs tells his readers that he discovered the text in a vault below a statue of Hermes in Tyana, and that, inside the vault, an old corpse on a golden throne held the emerald tablet. Slightly different versions of the Emerald Tablet also appear in the Kitāb Usṭuqus al-uss al-thānī (The Second Book of the Element of the Foundation, c. 850–950) attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan, in the longer version of the Sirr al-asrār (The Secret of Secrets, a tenth century compilation of earlier works that was falsely attributed to Aristotle), and in the Egyptian alchemist