Writings: HinduismThe Mahabharata Shalyaparvan of 13928 of 10

Writings: Hinduism

The Mahabharata Shalyaparvan of 1392

This palm-leaf volume holds the first section of the Shalyaparvan, a Mahabharata book. Tradition credits the epic to the sage Vyasa; Alf Hiltebeitel says it seems to have been composed about 500 BCE to 400 CE. Two scholars read its colophon, a scribe's note, as 12 November 1392 CE. A 1984 list places it in Kathmandu's National Archives.

Last reviewed:

Three dates, kept apart

  1. The text's date: the tradition's view

    The sources used here give no year for the epic's composition, which they credit to the sage Vyasa. ISKCON Educational Services, a Vaishnava source, places the war the epic tells of at the end of the Dvapara Yuga, the age before the Kali Yuga, which it says began some 5,000 years ago (about 3000 BCE, computed here from 2026). No statement on the epic's date or authorship from a Shaiva or Shakta tradition was found.

  2. The text's date: critical scholars' view

    about 500 BCE to 400 CE (Alf Hiltebeitel, who writes that the composition seems to have been carried out in that span, by authors who probably drew on older bardic traditions)

  3. This copy made

    12 November 1392 CE (the colophon's year, 513 of the Nepal Samvat era; Luciano Petech reports the date verified for that Tuesday)

  4. This copy found

    The sources used here do not say when or how the National Archives in Kathmandu acquired the volume or when this reel was filmed, though the Nepal-German project's page gives 1970 to 1975 for its filming of the Archives' whole collection.

All four rows share one timeline. A row with no marker says why in words. How ancient texts are dated.

What it is

This is one volume of the Mahabharata, the long Sanskrit epic of the war between two groups of cousins, the Pandavas and the Kauravas.1 ISKCON Educational Services, a Vaishnava source (Vaishnavas worship Vishnu and his incarnations, especially Krishna and Rama), calls it the history of greater India.23 Alf Hiltebeitel notes that it is also called the fifth Veda.1 This volume holds the first section of the Shalyaparvan, one of the eighteen books, called parvans, of the conventional division (a Southern division counts twenty-four).45

Camillo Formigatti, who lists the colophons of fourteenth-century Nepal, describes the volume as complete. It has 52 palm leaves, each 59 centimeters long and 4.5 wide, with five lines to a page and two holes for a binding cord. It is written in Nepalaksara, a script of Nepal whose name means "Nepal letters" (a translation made here).6 The book continues in a second volume, dated 30 June 1393, which holds the Gadaparvanika, a sub-section of the same book.65

How the copy was dated

The volume is dated by its colophon, the note in which a scribe says who copied a manuscript, when, and for whom. In Sanskrit verse, the colophon says the book was written in the year 513 "of Nepal," in the reign of King Jayasthitimalla. It gives the day as the twelfth of the dark half of the month of Karttika, a Tuesday.56 Luciano Petech, a historian of medieval Nepal, reports the date as verified for Tuesday, 12 November 1392.5

Formigatti published the colophon again in 2022 and gives the same date, though the two scholars read a few words of the verse differently.6 The colophon also names the scribe, Manikaraja, and the man who had the copy made, Jayasimharama. Petech calls Jayasimharama the prime minister who governed the principality of Bhonta.5 The sources used here report no dispute over the date and no radiocarbon test. For the methods, see how ancient texts are dated.

The text: its date and authorship

The date strip marks the Mahabharata as a whole, not this one book.

A Vaishnava account, with a scholar's report of the tradition

ISKCON Educational Services holds that the sage Vyasa originally composed the Mahabharata and that it was handed down over thousands of years to its present form of 110,000 verses.2

A second page places the war the epic tells of at the end of the Dvapara Yuga, one of four ages of the world. It says the Kali Yuga, the next age, began some 5,000 years ago.7 Hiltebeitel reports that Vyasa is the epic's reputed author and is credited with dividing the Vedas into four.1 No page gives a year for the composition. The sources used here include no statement on the epic's date or authorship from a Shaiva or Shakta tradition (centered on Shiva and on the goddess Shakti).8

Scholars of the epic

Alf Hiltebeitel, a scholar of Hinduism, writes in an entry of 1987 that the epic's composition seems to have been carried out between about 500 BCE and 400 CE, by authors who probably drew on older bardic traditions.1

V. S. Sukthankar edited the first volume of the critical edition published at Pune in 1933. He writes that the text the edition prints cannot be accurately dated and that, like every other edition, it is a mosaic of old and new matter: a chapter may hold a stanza of the second century BCE followed by one of the second century CE.4 The scholarly accounts used here date from 1933 and 1987.

How it was found

The sources used here do not say when or how the National Archives in Kathmandu acquired the volume. Petech lists it among the Archives' manuscripts in 1984. Formigatti gives its shelfmark, NAK 1/1693, and the number of its microfilm, A 28-6, from the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project.56 The project's history page says its team filmed the Archives' whole collection from 1970 to 1975 and lists the filming there as finishing in 1993. No source used here dates this reel.9

It was one volume of a larger undertaking. Petech writes that Jayasimharama had the epic copied in a great and costly effort, with a verse of praise to him opening the first volume. As far as Petech knew, only three volumes survived, holding the Adiparvan (the epic's first book), the first section of the Shalyaparvan, and the Gadaparvanika.54

Petech's note says a manuscript with that verse was once in the possession of the late Hemraj Sharman of Nepal and that Sukthankar's edition prints the verse. Sukthankar describes a Nepali manuscript that opens with praise of King Jayasimharama, at whose bidding it was copied. He gives about 1395 CE as the date of a king of that name and does not date the copy. He writes that Hemaraj of Nepal had its text collated for the Pune edition.54

What it shows, and what it does not

It shows that a book of the Mahabharata was copied on palm leaf in Nepal in 1392 CE, as one volume of a commissioned set, with the date carried by the colophon and reported verified by Petech. For comparison, the oldest dated manuscript in the apparatus of Sukthankar's edition of the Adiparvan is a Nepali copy dated about 1511 CE, about 120 years later (computed here). That is a different book.4

It does not show what the epic said in the centuries before 1392. On Hiltebeitel's dating, the copy comes about 1,000 to 1,900 years after the epic was composed. The tradition's sources give no year for the composition, though they place the war about 4,400 years before this copy (both computed here).17 It does not show that the volume's text matches the critical edition's, which the sources used here did not compare, and they do not say whether any older dated copy of part of the epic exists.4

See also

Sources

  1. Alf Hiltebeitel. Mahabharata. Encyclopedia of Religion, second edition (Macmillan Reference USA), via Encyclopedia.com, 2005. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  2. ISKCON Educational Services. Heart of Hinduism: Smriti: The Mahabharata. ISKCON Educational Services. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  3. Sivaya Subramuniyaswami. Dancing with Siva: Hinduism's Contemporary Catechism, sixth edition: Sloka 9, What Is the Devotional Vaishnava Sect?. Himalayan Academy (web edition), 2003, Sloka 9, What Is the Devotional Vaishnava Sect?. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  4. V. S. Sukthankar. Prolegomena (introduction to the Adiparvan), in The Mahabharata for the first time critically edited, vol. 1, Adiparvan. Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona, 1933, p. vi (the oldest dated manuscript of the Adiparvan apparatus, Ñ3, dated about 1511 CE), p. xiii (the manuscript Ñ1, in private possession in Nepal, and its eulogy of King Jayasimharama; the page also names Rajaguru Pandit Hemaraj as the one who had it collated), p. xiv (Ñ3 described), p. xxxiii (the conventional division into eighteen books), and p. ciii (what the constituted text is and is not). Accessed 2026-11-06.
  5. Luciano Petech. Mediaeval History of Nepal (c. 750-1482), second, thoroughly revised edition (Serie Orientale Roma 54). Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, Rome, 1984, p. 142 (documents 30 and 31), p. 153 (the Mahabharata undertaking of Jayasimha Rama), and pp. 208 to 209 (the Ramayana colophon of Samvat 1076 and the dispute over its era). Accessed 2026-11-06.
  6. Camillo Formigatti. Colophons in Fourteenth-Century Nepalese Manuscripts (chapter with transcriptions of dated colophons, including NGMPP A 28-6 and A 28-7). In Nalini Balbir and Giovanni Ciotti, eds., The Syntax of Colophons: A Comparative Study across Pothi Manuscripts (Studies in Manuscript Cultures 27), Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022, pp. 107 to 108 (entries 3.4.29 and 3.4.30). Accessed 2026-11-06.
  7. ISKCON Educational Services. Heart of Hinduism: The Tradition's Own Version. ISKCON Educational Services. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  8. Sivaya Subramuniyaswami. Dancing with Siva, Hinduism's Contemporary Catechism, sixth edition, "What Are Hinduism's Principal Sects?". Himalayan Academy, 2003, chapter 1, sloka 6. Accessed 2026-10-28.
  9. University of Hamburg, Asien-Afrika-Institut (Nepalese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project). History of the NGMPP. University of Hamburg. Accessed 2026-11-06.