The redaction of this large body of text was carried out after formal principles, emphasizing the numbers 18 and 12. Later, the copper-plate inscription of the Maharaja Sharvanatha from Khoh (Satna District, Madhya Pradesh) describes the Mahabharata as a "collection of 100,000 verses" (shatasahasri samhita). Christian Lassen, in his Indische Alterthumskunde, supposed that the reference is ultimately to Dhritarashtra's sorrows, the laments of Gandhari and Draupadi, and the valor of Arjuna and Duryodhana or Karna.This interpretation, endorsed in such standard references as Albrecht Weber's History of Indian Literature, has often been repeated without specific reference to what Dio's text says. The result is that.the people of India.are not unacquainted with the sufferings of Priam, the laments and wailings of Andromache and Hecuba, and the valor of both Achilles and Hector: so remarkable has been the spell of one man's poetry!"Despite the passage's evident face-value meaning-that the Iliad had been translated into Sanskrit-some scholars have supposed that the report reflects the existence of a Mahabharata at this date, whose episodes Dio or his sources syncretistically identify with the story of the Iliad. The Greek writer Dio Chrysostom reported, "it is said that Homer's poetry is sung even in India, where they have translated it into their own speech and tongue. Parts of the Jaya's original 8,800 verses possibly may date back as far as the 9th-8th century BCE. This may suggest that the core 24,000 verses, known as the Bharata, as well as an early version of the extended Mahabharata, were composed by the 4th century BCE. 4th century BCE), and in the Ashvalayana Grhyasutra (3.4.4). The earliest known references to the Mahabharata and its core Bharata date back to the Ashtadhyayi of Pāṇini (fl.
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Hermann Oldenberg (1922) supposed that the original poem must once have carried an immense "tragic force", but dismissed the full text as a "horrible chaos."
The state of the text has been described by some early 20th century Indologists as unstructured and chaotic. According to the Adi-parva of the Mahabharata the text was originally 8,800 verses when it was composed by Vyasa and was known as the Jaya (Victory), which later became 24,000 verses in the Bharata recited by Vaisampayana, and finally over 90,000 verses in the Mahabharata recited by Ugrasrava Sauti.Īs with the field of Homeric studies, research on the Mahabharata has put an enormous effort into recognizing and dating various layers within the text. The Mahabharata itself distinguishes a core portion of 24,000 verses, the Bharata proper, as opposed to additional secondary material, while the Ashvalayana Grhyasutra makes a similar distinction. It is usually thought that the full length of the Mahabharata has accreted over a long period.