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Heritage Science

Table 2 Main steps and ingredients of the recipes selected from al-Qalalūsī treatise to prepare iron gall inks; pH and gallic acid concentration of final extracts. For more details, please see text

From: The making of black inks in an Arabic treatise by al-Qalalūsī dated from the 13th c.: reproduction and characterisation of iron-gall ink recipes

  1. 1The recipe does not present the amount of iron sulphate, hence the three versions. It was decided in the first two to use the same amount of iron sulphate as in the QI.2 case
  2. 2When indicating in the recipe to cook over low heat, we consider carrying out two experiments with two thermal variants. One in the range of 100 °C and another in the range of 70 °C to understand if there were differences in the resulting inks.
  3. 3In the recipe it is indicated that a fine cloth be used for filtration that we identify as silk fabrics, in our experiences we substitute it with bags without bleaching additives, since they have the same characteristics for filtration.
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