The ancient Greek word for element, stoicheion (from stoicheo, "to line up") meant "smallest division (of a sun-dial), a syllable", as the composing unit of an alphabet it could denote a letter and the smallest unit from which a word is formed.Īccording to Galen, these elements were used by Hippocrates in describing the human body with an association with the four humours: yellow bile (fire), black bile (earth), blood (air), and phlegm (water). Plato seems to have been the first to use the term "element ( στοιχεῖον, stoicheîon)" in reference to air, fire, earth, and water. He called them the four "roots" ( ῥιζώματα, rhizōmata). Empedocles was the first to propose the four classical elements as a set: fire, earth, air, and water. Anaximander argued that the primordial substance was not any of the known substances, but could be transformed into them, and they into each other. Prior to Empedocles, Greek philosophers had debated which substance was the arche ("first principle"), or primordial element from which everything else was made Heraclitus championed fire, Thales supported water, and Anaximenes favored air. 450 BC) proved (at least to his satisfaction) that air was a separate substance by observing that a bucket inverted in water did not become filled with water, a pocket of air remaining trapped inside. The Sicilian Greek philosopher Empedocles ( c. The classical elements were first proposed independently by several early Presocratic philosophers. The log releases all four elements as it is destroyed. The four classical elements of Empedocles and Aristotle illustrated with a burning log. The most commonly observed states of solid, liquid, gas, and plasma share many attributes with the classical elements of earth, water, air, and fire, respectively, but these states are due to similar behavior of different types of atoms at similar energy levels, and not due to containing a certain type of atom or substance. These elements form chemical compounds and mixtures, and under different temperatures and pressures, these substances can adopt different states of matter. Atomic theory classifies atoms into more than a hundred chemical elements such as oxygen, iron, and mercury. Modern science does not support the classical elements as the material basis of the physical world.
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In Europe, the ancient Greek concept, devised by Empedocles, evolved into the system of Aristotle and Hippocrates, who introduced systematic classification into the area, which evolved slightly into the medieval system, which for the first time in Europe became subject to experimental verification in the 1600s, during the Scientific Revolution. While the classification of the material world in ancient Indian, Hellenistic Egypt, and ancient Greece into air, earth, fire, and water was more philosophical, during the Middle Ages medieval scientists used practical, experimental observation to classify materials. Some of these interpretations included atomism (the idea of very small, indivisible portions of matter), but other interpretations considered the elements to be divisible into infinitely small pieces without changing their nature.
Sometimes these theories overlapped with mythology and were personified in deities. These different cultures and even individual philosophers had widely varying explanations concerning their attributes and how they related to observable phenomena as well as cosmology. Ancient cultures in Greece, Tibet, and India had similar lists which sometimes referred, in local languages, to "air" as "wind" and the fifth element as "void". Classical elements typically refer to earth, water, air, fire, and (later) aether which were proposed to explain the nature and complexity of all matter in terms of simpler substances.
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