The alembic's lineage runs through the Greek alchemical writers of late antiquity, who worked with early stills, into the hands of Arabic alchemists of the eighth and ninth centuries, most associated with the corpus attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan, who fixed the two-vessel cucurbit-and-head design that later Europe inherited essentially unchanged. The word itself carries that history: Arabic al-anbiq attached its own definite article to the Greek ambix, and the compound passed into medieval Latin as alembicum during the translation movement that brought Arabic science into Europe, entering English by the fourteenth century, sometimes clipped further to "limbeck."
The device reached a wide readership when Hieronymus Brunschwig's Liber de arte distillandi, printed in Strasbourg in 1500, set out its use in the first printed manual devoted to distillation, aimed at apothecaries and surgeons rather than only alchemists. From there the alembic split along two paths that never really diverged: one stayed in the chemistry laboratory, gradually replaced for routine work by the round-bottom flask and a separate condenser, and the other went into the distillery, where the same cucurbit-and-head shape, built in copper instead of glass or clay, is still called a pot still and is still how a great deal of the world's whisky, cognac and rum is made. Few pieces of alchemical equipment can point to a living industry as their direct descendant.