 Now, we're going to look at the history and background of Ayurveda. So the name Ayurveda itself means the science of life or knowledge of life. The word Ayur in Sanskrit means life and Veda means knowledge. So it's knowledge of life or sometimes described as the science of life. In Ayurveda, there's a lot of use of the Sanskrit language. On this slide, you can see some ancient Sanskrit. It's a dead language, it's like Latin, it's not spoken anymore. But it's the ancient classical language in which many historical texts are written. And many Ayurvedic students will learn Sanskrit as part of their training. We don't need to do that and we stripped out as much Sanskrit terminology as possible but we will be referring to and defining some of these ancient Ayurvedic terms. What's really interesting with Ayurveda is we'll find that the links between Sanskrit and our language are very strong. Lots of these words that are thousands of years old in Indian culture are very, very similar to words that developed from the Greek system. It's a very interesting link. Historically, thousands of years ago that our cultures were linked. So the written records for Ayurveda date back around 4,000 years. But it's a much older tradition. Writing began about 4,000 years ago so we start to see the first written records. But it certainly existed long before that as a verbal tradition taught from master to student in an uninterrupted cycle. Some of the ancient sources of Ayurveda are the Vedas. Now Vedas are the ancient Indian sacred texts and there are various Vedas but the one that's really important for Ayurveda is the Athava Veda. This deals with the procedures for everyday living. It was first written down about a thousand years ago and what's fascinating and the thing that I love most about Ayurveda is it provides the basis of how Ayurveda is still practiced today. So over 3,000 years ago these basic principles were recorded and they still follow to this day. If you enjoyed this video please give it a like and subscribe below so you don't miss any future content. To learn more about C&M or its courses head to www.naturopathy-uk.com