Mahabharata
The Mahabharata (“Great Epic of the Bharata Dynasty”), a text of some 100,000 verses attributed to the sage Vyasa, was preserved both orally and in manuscript form for centuries. It is one of the two major Indian hero epics, the Ramayana being the other one. Mahabharata is nearly 3,000 years old and in size, it is more than ten times larger than the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. The Bhagavad-Gita is also part of the Mahabharata.
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Mahabharata also contains philosophical and devotional material, such as a discussion of the four "goals of life" or purusartha (12.161). Among the principal works and stories in the Mahabharata are the Bhagavad Gita, the story of Damayanti, the story of Shakuntala, the story of Pururava and Urvashi, the story of Savitri and Satyavan, the story of Kacha and Devayani, the story of Rishyasringa and an abbreviated version of the Ramayana, often considered as works in their own right.
Traditionally, the authorship of the Mahabharata is attributed to Vyasa. There have been many attempts to unravel its historical growth and compositional layers. The bulk of the Mahabharata was probably compiled between the 3rd century BCE and the 3rd century CE, with the oldest preserved parts not much older than around 400 BCE. The text probably reached its final form by the early Gupta period (c. 4th century CE).
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The Mahabharata is the longest epic poem known and has been described as "the longest poem ever written". Its longest version consists of over 100,000 sloka or over 200,000 individual verse lines (each shloka is a couplet), and long prose passages. At about 1.8 million words in total, the Mahabharata is roughly ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, or about four times the length of the Ramayana. Within the Indian tradition it is sometimes called the fifth Veda. The title is translated as "Great Bharat (India)", or "the story of the great descendents of Bharata".
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