The "Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon (Huangdi Nei Jing)", the oldest received work of Chinese medical theory, was compiled during the Han dynasty around the 1st century BCE on the basis of shorter texts from different medical lineages. Written in the form of dialogues between the legendary Yellow Emperor and his ministers, it offers explanations on the relation between humans, their environment, and the cosmos, on the contents of the body, on human vitality and pathology, on the symptoms of illness, and on how to make diagnostic and therapeutic decisions in light of all these factors. Unlike earlier texts like "Recipes for Fifty-Two Ailments", which was excavated in the 1970s from a tomb that had been sealed in 168 BCE, the "Inner Canon" rejected the influence of spirits and the use of magic. It was also one of the first books in which the cosmological doctrines of Yinyang and the Five Phases were brought to a mature synthesis.