Mahabharata

The ''Mahābhārata'' ( ; , , ) is a smriti text (also described as a Sanskrit epic) from ancient India, one of the two important epics of Hinduism known as the ''Itihasas'', the other being the ''Ramayana''. It narrates the events and aftermath of the Kurukshetra War, a war of succession between two groups of princely cousins, the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas. It contains philosophical and devotional material, such as a discussion of the four "goals of life" or ''puruṣārtha'' (12.161). Among the principal works and stories in the ''Mahābhārata'' are the Bhagavad Gita, the story of Damayanti, Shakuntala, Pururava and Urvashi, Savitri and Satyavan, Kacha and Devayani, Rishyasringa and an abbreviated version of the Rāmāyaṇa.

Traditionally, the authorship of the ''Mahābhārata'' is attributed to Vyāsa. There have been many attempts to unravel its historical growth and compositional layers. The bulk of the ''Mahābhārata'' 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 ().

The title is translated as "Great Bharat (India)", or "the story of the great descendants of Bharata", or as "''The Great Indian Tale''". The ''Mahābhārata'' is the longest epic poem known and has been described as "the longest poem ever written". Its longest version consists of over 100,000 shlokas (verses) or over 200,000 individual lines (each shloka is a couplet), and long prose passages. At about 1.8 million words in total, the ''Mahābhārata'' is roughly ten times the length of the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'' combined, or about four times the length of the ''Rāmāyaṇa''. Within the Indian tradition it is sometimes called the fifth Veda. Provided by Wikipedia