Vyāsa described it as being itihāsa ( transl. The epic is traditionally ascribed to the sage Vyāsa, who is also a major character in the epic. Modern depiction of Vyasa narrating the Mahābhārata to Ganesha at the Murudeshwara temple, Karnataka. Within the Indian tradition it is sometimes called the fifth Veda. 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.
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. Its longest version consists of over 100,000 śloka or over 200,000 individual verse lines (each shloka is a couplet), and long prose passages. The Mahābhārata is the longest epic poem known and has been described as "the longest poem ever written". The text probably reached its final form by the early Gupta period (c. The original events related by the epic probably fall between the 9th and 8th centuries BCE. 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. There have been many attempts to unravel its historical growth and compositional layers. Traditionally, the authorship of the Mahābhārata is attributed to Vyāsa. Krishna and Arjuna at Kurukshetra, 18th–19th-century painting
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