The Emerald Tablet

Twelve lines attributed to Hermes, said to contain the whole art. "As above, so below" is line two.

The Emerald Tablet: a short Hermetic text — 'that which is below is like that which is above' — whose oldest known version is Arabic, in the Kitab sirr al-haliqa (c. 8th century), later translated into Latin and glossed by alchemists for centuries, including a translation in Isaac Newton's own hand. Lore assigns it to Hermes Trismegistus and antediluvian origins; no Greek original has ever been found. Twelve lines of text that generated a millennium of laboratories: the densest artifact-to-consequence ratio on this map.