The Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient  India, the other being the Ramayana. The epic is part of the Hindu itihasa (or  “history”). Besides its epic narrative of the Kurukshetra War and the fates of the  Kauravas and the Pandavas, the Mahabharata contains much philosophical and devotional material, such as a discussion of the four “goals of life” or purusharthas (12.161). The latter are enumerated as dharma (right action), artha  (purpose), kama (pleasure), and moksha (liberation). Among the principal works and stories that are a part of the Mahabharata is the Bhagavad Gita, the story of  Damayanti, an abbreviated version of the Ramayana, and the Rishyasringa, often considered 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 earliest parts of the text are not appreciably older than around 400 BCE.[1] The text probably reached its final form by the early Gupta period (ca. 4th c. CE).[2] The title may be translated as “the great tale of the Bhārata dynasty”. According to the Mahabharata itself, the tale is extended from a shorter version of 24,000 verses called simply Bhārata.  With about one hundred thousand verses, long prose passages, or about 1.8 million words in total, the Mahabharata is roughly ten times the length of the Iliad and  Odyssey combined, or about four times the length of the Ramayana.