It would be a mistake to suppose that Sanskrit literature came into being only at the close of the Vedic period, or that it merely forms its continuation and development. As a profane literature, it must, in its earliest phases, which are lost, have been contemporaneous with the religious literature of the Vedas. Beside the productions of the latest Vedic period, that of the Upanishads and Sutras, there grew up, on the one hand, the rich Pali literature of Buddhism, and, on the other, the earliest form of Sanskrit poetry in the shape of epic tales. We have seen that even the Rigveda contains some hymns of a narrative character. Later we find in the Brahmanas a number of short legends, mostly in prose, but sometimes partly metrical, as the story of Çunahçepa in the Aitareya. Again, the Nirukta, which must date from the fifth century B.C., contains many prose tales, and the oldest existing collection of Vedic legend, the metrical Brihaddevata, cannot belong to a much later time. Sanskrit epic poetry falls into two main classes. That which comprises old stories goes by the name of Itihasa, "legend," Akhyana, "narrative," or Purana, "ancient tale," while the other is called Kavya or artificial epic. The Mahabharata is the chief and oldest representative of the former group, the Ramayana of the latter. Both these great epics are composed in the same form of the çloka metre as that employed in classical Sanskrit poetry. The Mahabharata, however, also contains, as remnants of an older phase, archaic verses in the upajati and vamçastha (developments of the Vedic trishtubh and jagati) metres, besides preserving some old prose stories in what is otherwise an entirely metrical work. It further differs from the sister epic in introducing speeches with words, such as "Brihadaçva spake," which do not form part of the verse, and which may be survivals of prose narrative connecting old epic songs. The Ramayana, again, is, in the main, the work of a single poet, homogeneous in plan and execution, composed in the east of India. The Mahabharata, arising in the western half of the country, is a congeries of parts, the only unity about which is the connectedness of the epic cycle with which they deal; its epic kernel, moreover, which forms only about one-fifth of the whole work, has become so overgrown with didactic matter, that in its final shape it is not an epic at all, but an encyclopædia of moral teaching.