Compilation of the Charaka Samhita and the Codification of Ayurveda

Date

c. 100 CE

Category

Science, technology & invention

Region

South Asia (Indian subcontinent)

Era

Classical Antiquity

Significance

Around the turn of the 1st-2nd century CE, the physician-redactor Charaka revised and systematised an older medical compendium attributed to the teacher Atreya and his pupil Agnivesha, producing the Charaka Samhita, one of the two foundational surviving texts of Ayurveda alongside the Sushruta Samhita.

Written in Sanskrit and organised into eight books (sthanas) comprising 120 chapters, the work set out comprehensive theories of physiology, diagnosis, anatomy, pathology, pharmacology, and therapeutics, centred on the tridosha doctrine of three bodily humours (vata, pitta, and kapha). It emphasised a rational, preventive, and ethical approach to medicine, including the duties of the physician and the four essentials of treatment (physician, nurse, patient, and medicines). Modern scholars date Charaka's redaction to roughly 100 BCE-200 CE, with a final editing by Dridhabala in the early centuries CE, while the underlying tradition reaches back several centuries earlier. The text marked the codification of Ayurveda as a structured medical science and exerted enduring influence on South Asian and, through later translations, wider medical traditions.

Empires active in c. 100 CE

• Han Dynasty
  202 BCE – 220 CE
• Roman Empire
  27 BCE – 476 CE
• Kingdom of Funan
  50 CE – 550 CE
• Zapotec State of Monte Albán
  500 BCE – 800 CE
• Kushan Empire
  30 CE – 375 CE
• Parthian Empire
  247 BCE – 224 CE

Related science, technology & invention events

• Cai Lun standardises papermaking
  105 CE
• Inauguration of the Colosseum (Flavian Amphitheatre)
  80 CE
• Zhang Heng invents the seismoscope
  132 CE
• Ptolemy completes the Almagest
  c. 150 CE
• The Bakhshali manuscript and the earliest recorded zero
  c. 224–383 CE (carbon-dated)
• Earliest securely dated Maya/Mesoamerican Long Count inscription
  36 BCE (Long Count 7.16.3.2.13)

Further reading

A Little History of Science

The wider story

A Little History of Science

William Bynum

Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.

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