Ancient texts document the circulation of materia medica circulate across time, across languages, across intellectual and ethnic cultures and across space. They become combined with other drugs, and these recipes also circulate, and change, according to regional access, to intellectual and ecological climate, to local economies and tastes. Histories have been written of single drugs, such as sugar, or coffee, or cinchona, tracking their movement across language, regions, genre and time. However, to study movements of multiple drugs on a large-scale, their patterns, periodization and regionalization, would require philological and linguistic expertise beyond the most gifted scholars.

Medicines Across Eurasia seeks to build fundamental tools for such narratives, by creating digital tools to house full-text primary sources, to search for thousands of drugs at once, and to do so across languages. Then to sort and analyse the results according to precise historical data, and to visualize those results.

Currently the project already handles Chinese-language sources, large term searches, and visualizes term distribution in multiple ways. A set of Daoist, Buddhist and medical texts dating up to 589 has been published online, as has a fully marked-up edition of the Bencao jing jizhu 本草經集注, including geographic distributions of the drugs. We are currently building a Chinese drug term synonymy (別名), to allow users to identify the name variations of any given medicinal.

Pending applications, I will expand the project to function with other languages, namely Sanskrit, Arabic, Hebrew, Latin and Greek for the next phase. Working with experts in these traditions, we will build from-manuscript searchable text collections on the model of the Chinese platform. This will include a cross-language drug synonymy, that links ethnonyms and botanical identities through to matching ethnonyms in other languages, allowing one to use one language to search texts in other languages.