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Dust cover has a price sticker stuck to it and some tears from aging. Some underlining with blue pen inside. “Epic poems of ancient India, dating from the fourth to the sixth centuries, are here condensed into English verse by Romesh C. Dutt.” The Mahabharata and the Ramayana are the two most famous early Sanskrit epic poems from classical India. This “Great Indian Tale” stands as the world’s longest poem and serves as both a guide for Hindu morality and a history (itihasa) of early Hindu India. Authorship is traditionally ascribed to Vyasa, a legendary sage (rishi) who appears in the text as a character as well. The tales included in the Mahabharata existed for centuries in oral form, as Vyasa lived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries BC, nearly twenty centuries before the earliest surviving written copy. The stories in the Mahabharata work to explore the four goals of a person’s life, according to Hindu tradition.