AD 400

Mahābhārata

Claimed finalization of the Mahābhārata (no exact event attested)

The date 401 appears in no colophon and no inscription; it is a modern rounding of an eight-century composition range.

A rounding, not a finishing

No source records an author, editor, court or scribal group finalising the Mahābhārata in 401. The conventional date of around 400 CE is an approximate endpoint for a long range of textual development, not an event date.

A common institutional summary dates the epic’s development from approximately 400 BCE to around 400 CE, and describes the process as extending over a long period.

An Oxford study summarises the mainstream outer limits as a terminus post quem in the fourth century BCE and a terminus ante quem in the fourth century CE, while emphasising scholarly disagreement over how the epic formed.

What the early witnesses show

The much earlier Spitzer manuscript preserves an ancient list of Mahābhārata books, showing that a recognisable large-scale structure existed by roughly the second or third century CE. It does not prove that every later passage was already fixed.

The earliest evidence the Oxford study cites for the epic at approximately its full traditional extent is a land-grant inscription of 532–533 CE, which calls it a collection of 100,000 verses.

That inscription establishes a later terminus; it does not date completion to 401.

Which final text?

Modern comparison of numerous divergent manuscripts produced a critical edition of about 83,000 verses, while the recension accompanied by Nīlakaṇṭha’s commentary approaches 100,000.

So “final form” may mean a lost archetype, the common ancestor of the recensions, a traditional 100,000-verse text, or the modern critical edition — and these are not interchangeable.

The Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute’s critical edition is a twentieth-century scholarly reconstruction, not an ancient final copy.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 7 sources not yet audited Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at ~0400.

What the sources leave uncertain

Approximately 400 CE is the edge of a conventional scholarly range, not a precise year—still less the specific year 401.
Scholars disagree over a long accretion model versus proposals for a shorter, substantially written composition around 150 BCE–1 CE.
“Final form” may mean a lost archetype, the common ancestor of recensions, a traditional 100,000-verse text, or the much later modern critical edition; these are not interchangeable.
The sixth-century inscription proves that a 100,000-verse Mahābhārata was recognized by then, but cannot identify the exact year in which it reached that extent.