Before the Sanskrit term shilajit became familiar in European medical literature, before Sanskrit medical texts became widely known to European scholarship, a Persian physician in the city of Rey, in what is now Iran, was already writing about it with clinical precision.

His name was Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi. In the Latin West, he was called Rhazes.

WHO WAS RHAZES

The empiricist

Rhazes was born around 854 CE in the Persian city of Rey, a Silk Road city close to present-day Tehran. He studied and practised in Rey and Baghdad, eventually becoming court physician. He is regarded as one of the greatest physicians of the medieval Islamic world, writing over 200 works across medicine, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and alchemy.

What set him apart was method. He placed unusual emphasis on clinical observation for his era, writing detailed case histories, conducting what we would now recognise as comparative trials, and placing what he saw in front of what he had been taught.

His major work, Al-Hawi, the Comprehensive Book, Continens Liber in Latin, ran to over twenty volumes. It was one of the most exhaustive medical encyclopaedias ever compiled. Rhazes drew on Greek, Syrian, Persian, and Indian medical sources alongside his own clinical observations. It included a documented account of the bituminous substance seeping from highland rock faces that he called abdaroo, healing water.

THE SOURCE

The highland rock faces of Persia

Rey sits at the foot of the Alborz mountain range, the range you see in these photographs. To the west lie the Zagros mountains. These highland sources were documented in Persian medical literature as the origin of moomiaii, the Persian name for the substance Rhazes was writing about.

A note on terminology: moomiaii, mumijo, mumie, these are regional names for closely related mineral-organic rock exudates formed through similar geological processes across different mountain ranges. Himalayan shilajit, which we have sourced and prepared since 1998, comes from a specific and distinct geological environment, higher altitude, different rock composition, a different processing tradition. We consider it the superior source. But the physicians who first documented this substance were working with what their mountains provided, and their clinical observations were serious and valuable.

Rhazes was not writing mythology. He was writing medicine, from clinical observation, about a substance he had access to, in a city at the edge of the mountains that produced it.

THE SILK ROAD

The corridor

Rey was a major Silk Road city. The trade routes that passed through it connected Persia to Central Asia, to what are now Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan, and from there to China, India, and the Himalayan world beyond.

The substance Rhazes documented in Persian highland sources and the substance documented in ancient Sanskrit Ayurvedic texts from the Himalayas are closely related mineral-organic rock exudates. The Persian and Indian medical traditions developed closely related understandings of it through parallel traditions and long-standing exchange across these same trade routes, across the interconnected mountain regions stretching from Persia through Central Asia to the Himalayas.

Between 1995 and 1998, in the years between my first Himalayan trip and the expedition that birthed Pure Shilajit, I worked in natural resources across Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, the Silk Road corridor that ran through Rhazes’ world. I didn’t know then that I was travelling the same geography.

WHY IT MATTERS

Observation, not doctrine

What makes Rhazes significant for shilajit is not just that he was early. It is that his method placed unusual weight on clinical observation. He was among the earliest physicians in any tradition to insist that what he saw should take precedence over inherited authority. His case histories, his comparative notes, his documentation of what he actually witnessed in patients, this is the foundation his account rests on.

He was not simply repeating what Galen had said. He was writing from what he had observed. I consider this to be a different kind of testimony.

Persian medical literature reviewed in a 2018 peer-reviewed study confirms that shilajit, documented under its Persian names moomiaii and mumnaei, was used across a wide range of conditions, and that the risk of fungal contamination in improperly prepared material was already understood. The need for correct preparation was not a modern discovery.

The market today has no memory of any of this. It treats the substance as interchangeable, its preparation as a detail, its provenance as a marketing choice. Rhazes would have had no patience for that, and neither do we.

ORDER PURE SHILAJIT AND SURYA RESERVE