A review by tikitu
The Secrets of Alchemy by Lawrence M. Principe

Textual history is freaking complicated... From pg 31: "The exact origin of the /[Emerald] Tablet/ remains obscure. Most evidence indicates that it was written centuries after the bulk of the philosophical or technical /Hermetica/, and that it is an original Arabic composition dating from the eighth century. No Greek precursor or any earlier Greek citations of it have been located despite exhaustive searches. It first appeared appended to a work which itself has complex and obscure origins, the /Book of the Secret of Creation/ (/Kitāb sirr al-khalīqa/) by one “Balīnūs,” an early ninth-century author writing in Arabic under the name of the much earlier Greek author Apollonios of Tyana. Balīnūs's work is itself a pastiche; newer materials are combined with an earlier Syriac text by a priest names Sajiyus of Nablus, which itself incorporates yet older Greek material. How exactly the /Tablet/ fits into this muddle remains unclear. Nevertheless, it seems safe enough to doubt the veracity of the account told in the /Book of the Secret of Creation/ that the text was discovered, written in Syriac on a tablet of green stone, clenched in the hands of an ancient corpse buried in a subterranean sepulcher hidden beneath a statue of Hermes Trismegistus."