700 BC

Upanishads

Oral composition of the earliest Upaniṣads begins around this period

Nothing was written. The listing's date marks one proposed boundary of a compositional range that scholars measure in centuries, not days.

A range, not a date

No recoverable event belongs to a day in 700 BCE. One scholarly chronology places the oral composition of the Upaniṣads in Sanskrit broadly between about 700 and 300 BCE, with an early group assigned to roughly 700–500.

That early group includes the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, Chāndogya, Taittirīya, Aitareya and Kauṣītakī.

Other reference scholarship starts earlier still, giving about 900–300 BCE for the early classical Upaniṣads — a difference of roughly two centuries in where to begin.

Composed by voice, in schools

These are layered compilations that accumulated in different Vedic schools through recitation and teaching, not a single act of authorship. Separate passages within one named Upaniṣad may have different dates.

They incorporate several forms at once: ritual interpretations, creation accounts, teacher lineages, formulas, narratives and philosophical dialogues.

Oral composition, compilation, textual stabilisation and the dates of surviving manuscripts are four separate questions, and "written in 700 BCE" answers none of them.

Not a break with ritual, and not one doctrine

The early works stayed closely connected to Vedic ritual interpretation even as some passages moved toward sustained inquiries into the body, self, life, death and reality. One passage maps the body of a sacrificial horse onto elements, regions and units of cosmic time.

The identity of ātman and brahman is highly influential but does not exhaust the corpus: different teachers give different, sometimes competing accounts.

The familiar figure of 108 is a traditional canonical motif, not a count. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy counts thirteen major Upaniṣads, and hundreds of later works have carried the name.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 3 sources not yet audited Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at ~-700.

What the sources leave uncertain

The date 700 BCE is only a convenient approximation near one proposed boundary of a broad compositional range.
A major reference work gives roughly 900–300 BCE for the early classical Upaniṣads, while the IEP places oral composition of the corpus around 700–300 BCE and its first stage around 700–500 BCE.
These are layered compilations, so separate passages within the same named Upaniṣad may have different dates.
The texts were composed and transmitted orally; 'written in 700 BCE' is not supported.