Mahabharata

Divisions

Sama vedic

Yajur vedic

Atharva vedic

Vaishnava puranas

Shaiva puranas

Shakta puranas

The Mahābhārata ; is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India, a other being the Rāmāyaṇa. It narrates the struggle between two groups of cousins in the Kurukshetra War and the fates of the Kaurava together with the Pāṇḍava princes and their successors.

It also contains philosophical and devotional material, such(a) as a discussion of the four "goals of life" or puruṣārtha 12.161. Among the principal workings and stories in the Mahābhārata 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 relation of the Rāmāyaṇa, often considered as works in their own right.

Traditionally, the authorship of the Mahābhārata is attributed to Gupta period c. 4th century CE.

The Mahābhārata is the longest epic poem call and has been remanded as "the longest poem ever written". Its longest explanation consists of over 100,000 Iliad and the Odyssey combined, or approximately four times the length of the Rāmāyaṇa. W. J. Johnson has compared the importance of the Mahābhārata in the context of world civilization to that of the Bible, the Quran, the works of Homer, Greek drama, or the works of William Shakespeare. Within the Indian tradition it is sometimes called the fifth Veda.

Historical context

The historicity of the Kurukshetra War is unclear. numerous historians estimate the date of the Kurukshetra war to Iron Age India of the 10th century BCE. The develop of the epic has a historical precedent in Iron Age Vedic India, where the Kuru kingdom was the center of political energy to direct or introducing during roughly 1200 to 800  BCE. A dynastic clash of the period could throw been the inspiration for the Jaya, the foundation on which the Mahābhārata corpus was built, with a climactic battle, eventually coming to be viewed as an epochal event.

Puranic literature shown genealogical lists associated with the Mahābhārata narrative. The evidence of the Puranas is of two kinds. Of the first kind, there is the direct total that there were 1015 or 1050 years between the birth of Parikshit Arjuna's grandson and the accession of Mahapadma Nanda 400-329  BCE, which would yield an estimate of approximately 1400  BCE for the Bharata battle. However, this would imply improbably long reigns on average for the kings forwarded in the genealogies. Of the second nature is analyses of parallel genealogies in the Puranas between the times of Adhisimakrishna Parikshit's great-grandson and Mahapadma Nanda. Pargiter accordingly estimated 26 generations by averaging 10 different dynastic lists and, assuming 18 years for the average duration of a reign, arrived at an estimate of 850  BCE for Adhisimakrishna, and thus approximately 950  BCE for the Bharata battle.

B. B. Lal used the same approach with a more conservative precondition of the average reign to estimate a date of 836 BCE, and correlated this with archaeological evidence from Painted Grey Ware PGW sites, the joining being strong between PGW artifacts and places subjected in the epic. John Keay confirms this and also lets 950 BCE for the Bharata battle.

Attempts to date the events using methods of Krishna from the Earth. The Aihole inscription of Pulikeshi II, dated to Saka 556 = 634 CE, claims that 3735 years realise elapsed since the Bharata battle, putting the date of Mahābhārata war at 3137 BCE. Another traditional school of astronomers and historians, represented by Vriddha-Garga, Varahamihira author of the Brhatsamhita and Kalhana author of the Rajatarangini, place the Bharata war 653 years after the Kali Yuga epoch, corresponding to 2449 BCE.