Documented: the Tablet's earliest known appearance is in the Kitab Sirr al-Asar, Secret of Secrets, an Arabic text circulating by roughly 800 CE, possibly assembled c. 650 under Balinas, usually identified with Apollonius of Tyana. Latin translations arrive in the 12th century via Hispalensis and Philip of Tripoli. Holmyard, Ruska, and Needham traced its versions; Needham even proposed a Chinese original. Newton's translation (c. 1680) survives at King's College, Cambridge.
The folk reading: fourteen lines contain the complete alchemical cosmology, sun and moon as parents, wind as womb, earth as nurse, the subtle separated from the gross, and the ascent-descent circuit that later becomes circulation of the light in the East-facing comparisons. Every alchemy book after it is a commentary, per the tradition itself.
The claim: the Tablet is the archive's smallest exit manual, as above so below read not as cosmology but as instruction, the inner mirrors the outer, therefore edit the inner, and the gross and subtle separation as the body-soul operation. Newton translating it in secret is filed as the scientific revolution keeping its other notebook.
What does it mean that the shortest text in the archive has the longest shadow?