The longest written epic from antiquity is the ancient Indian
Mahabharata (–3rd century AD), which consists of 100,000
ślokas or over 200,000 verse lines (each shloka is a couplet), as well as long prose passages, so that at ~1.8 million words it is roughly twice the length of
Shahnameh, four times the length of the
Rāmāyaṇa, and roughly ten times the length of the
Iliad and the
Odyssey combined.
