In the Bible, 2 Peter 3:10 says, “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, in which the heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed (melt, dissolve) with intense heat, and the earth and its works will be burned up.”
It strikes me as interesting that these words were written 2000 years ago, but it was not until modern physics and chemistry that we learned that elements can dissolve and create intense heat.
It seems to be the first record of mass/energy conversion (E=mc^2) 2000 years before Einstein.