The term apocrypha is used with various meanings, including " hidden ", " esoteric ", " spurious ", " of questionable authenticity ", ancient Chinese " revealed texts and objects " and " Christian texts that are not canonical ".

The ancient Chinese called the substance " dragon's spittle fragrance ".

Examples of early botanical works have been found in ancient sacred texts from India, ancient Zoroastrian writings, and ancient Chinese works.

According to ancient Chinese, Indian and Javanese manuscripts, western coastal cities of Borneo had become trading ports, part of their trade routes, since the first millennium.

The 28 lunar mansions are one of the most important and also the most ancient structures in the Chinese sky, attested from the 5th century BC.

Parallels to the earliest Babylonian ( Sumerian ) star catalogues suggest that the ancient Chinese system did not arise independently from that of the Ancient Near East.

The findings at Anyang include the earliest written record of Chinese past so far discovered: inscriptions of divination records in ancient Chinese writing on the bones or shells of animals – the so-called " oracle bones ", dating from around 1200 BC.

Although much of Chinese philosophy begins in the Warring States period, elements of Chinese philosophy have existed for several thousand years ; some can be found in the Yi Jing ( the Book of Changes ), an ancient compendium of divination, which dates back to at least 672 BCE.

Although the People's Republic of China has been historically hostile to the philosophy of ancient China, the influences of past are still deeply ingrained in the Chinese culture.

Yin and yang are ancient Chinese concepts which can be traced back to the Shang dynasty ( 1600 – 1100 BC ).

Yin, Yang, and the five elements are associated with themes in the I Ching, the oldest of Chinese classical texts which describes an ancient system of cosmology and philosophy.

Nevertheless, the ancient Chinese concept of Qi or chi is believed to be close to that of air.

Water is one of the elements in ancient Greek philosophy, in the Asian Indian system Panchamahabhuta, and in the Chinese cosmological and physiological system Wu Xing.

The Wu Xing, ( 五行 wŭ xíng ) also known as the Five Phases, the Five Agents, the Five Movements, and the Five Steps / Stages, are chiefly an ancient mnemonic device, in many traditional Chinese fields.

In 307 BC, King Wuling of Zhao, the ancient Chinese ruler of the former State of Jin territory, ordered his military commanders and troops to adopt the trousers of the nomads as well as practice the nomads ' form of mounted archery to hone their new cavalry skills.

The adoption of massed cavalry in China also broke the tradition of the chariot-riding Chinese aristocracy in battle, which had been in use since the ancient Shang Dynasty ( c. 1600 BC-1050 BC ).

According to Needham, though there is no way of answering the question of whether the crossbow first arose among the cultures neighboring ancient China before the rise of Chinese culture in their midst, or whether it spread outwards from China to all the environing peoples, the former seems the more probable hypothesis given linguistic evidence, which posits that the Chinese word for ' crossbow ' came from an Austroasiatic language.

Despite the limitations imposed on ancient Chinese concubines, history and literature have examples of concubines achieving great power and influence.

Zhan Guo Ce was a renowned ancient Chinese historical work and compilation of sporadic materials on the Warring States Period compiled between 3rd century to 1st century BCE.

He believed that the reform of the civil service into a meritocratic system and the disappearance of the ancient Chinese nobility from the bureaucracy constituted a modern society.

The term was used of the Empiric school of ancient Greek medical practitioners, who rejected the doctrines of the ( Dogmatic school ), preferring to rely on the observation of phenomena.

Because Galen's works were not translated into Latin in the ancient period, and because of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, the study of Galen, along with the Greek medical tradition as a whole, went into decline in Western Europe during the Early Middle Ages, when very few Latin scholars could read Greek.

However, Galen and the ancient Greek medical tradition generally continued to be studied and followed in the Eastern Roman Empire, commonly known as the Byzantine Empire.

The ancient Egyptians had a system of medicine that was very advanced for its time and influenced later medical traditions.

The Hippocratic Corpus, is a collection of around seventy early medical works from ancient Greece strongly associated with the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates and his teachings.

The Ebers papyrus also provides our earliest possible documentation of ancient awareness of tumors, but ancient medical terminology being badly understood, cases Ebers 546 and 547 for instance may refer to simple swellings.

Her title was “ Lady Overseer of the Lady Physicians .” In addition to her supervisory role, Peseshet trained midwives at an ancient Egyptian medical school in Sais.

Along with contemporary ancient Egyptian medicine, the Babylonians introduced the concepts of diagnosis, prognosis, physical examination, and medical prescriptions.

" The Hippocratic Corpus is a collection of around seventy early medical works from ancient Greece strongly associated with Hippocrates and his students.

An ancient Greek patient gets medical treatment: this aryballos ( circa 480 – 470 BCE, now in Paris's Louvre | Louvre Museum ) probably contained healing oil

Opium is mentioned in the most important medical texts of the ancient world, including the Ebers Papyrus and the writings of Dioscorides, Galen, and Avicenna.

This word patient is an ancient reminder of medical duty, as it originally meant ' one who suffers '.

That same year, sitting in a library in New Orleans while his father took medical courses at a nearby college, Howard discovered a book concerned with the scant fact and abundant legends surrounding an indigenous culture in ancient Scotland called the Picts.

The Thermae Selinuntiae ( at modern Sciacca ), which derived their name from the ancient city, and seem to have been much frequented in the time of the Romans, were situated at a considerable distance, 30 km, from Selinunte: they are sulfurous springs, still much valued for their medical properties, and dedicated, like most thermal waters in Sicily, to San Calogero.

Surgery ( from the cheirourgikē, via, meaning " hand work ") is an ancient medical specialty that uses operative manual and instrumental techniques on a patient to investigate and / or treat a pathological condition such as disease or injury, or to help improve bodily function or appearance.

The earliest known writings on the circulatory system are found in the Ebers Papyrus ( 16th century BCE ), an ancient Egyptian medical papyrus containing over 700 prescriptions and remedies, both physical and spiritual.

This interpretation is disputed, however: other investigators contend the ancient Sanskrit medical texts of India do not describe these techniques.

In this period the royal palace ( Castel Terracena ) and the magnificent Arab-Gothic style cathedral were built, and science was boosted as the Salerno Medical School, considered the most ancient medical institution of European West, reached its maximum splendour.

A noted medical school, or series of schools, existed at Salerno from at least the 10th century, and by the 11th century it was widely acknowledged by contemporaries as the centre of medical knowledge in western Europe, in much the same way as Alexandria had been in the ancient world.

With his knowledge of Arabic and Greek as well as Latin, he began to translate many of the medical texts from ancient Greece and Rome from the surviving Arabic translations into Latin.

Bloodletting is one of the oldest medical practices, having been practiced among ancient peoples including the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Mayans, and the Aztecs.

The ancient Greeks also made important discoveries in the medical field.