The sieve, like the mortar and pestle it typically followed, has no single traceable inventor or point of origin: sieving tools of woven cloth, wire mesh, or a perforated surface stretched over a frame are documented across virtually every ancient and medieval culture that processed grain, minerals, or pigments and needed to grade the fineness of the result. Its role in an alchemical workshop was a quality check as much as a processing step: rather than trusting that grinding alone had produced a fine enough powder, the sieve gave an objective, repeatable way to confirm it, separating anything still too coarse back out for further work in the mortar. That combination of grinding and sieving, mortar and pestle followed by a sieve, appears as a standard preparatory pairing across alchemical, pharmaceutical, and early chemical practice alike.
The tool required essentially no reinvention to remain useful into the present: sieves and test screens, now often precisely machined wire mesh rather than woven cloth, remain standard equipment in chemistry and materials testing laboratories, food processing, and industrial powder handling, doing exactly the same particle-size grading job under the same working principle.