Pancharatra was a religious movement in Hinduism that originated in the late 3rd-century BCE around the ideas of Narayana and the various avatar and forms of Vishnu as their central deities. The movement later merged with the Bhagavata tradition and contributed to the development of Vaishnavism. The Pancharatra movement created numerous literary treatises in Sanskrit called the Pancharatra Samhitas, and these have been influential Agamic texts within the theistic Vaishnava movements.