The core of Ayurvedic knowledge, continually expanding and improving, was handed down for nearly two thousand years, since the time of great sages, until the venerated Charaka provided Indian medicine with its first written text in the Charaka Samhita (Treatise of Charaka) in the 1st century A.D.

By Charaka's time, long before the birth of European medicine, Ayurvedic medicine had already developed into eight specialized schools.

During the first millenium A.D. Ayurvedic texts were added to by many physicians and surgeons, and Arab traders conveyed this information to the physicians of the Arab, Greek and Roman worlds whose own knowledge would eventually form the basis of European medicine. Europeans were learning medical science through writings of great Arab physicians.

The evidence of the robustness of Ayurvedic medicine is given both in the records of successive emperors of India and European travelers to India in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeen centuries.