Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest recognized epic poem, recorded in ancient Sumer during the Neo-Sumerian Empire. This text predates the invention of writing itself and details the exploits of Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk.
The ancient Indian Mahabharata was composed between the 4th century BC and the 3rd century AD. It consists of 100,000 ślokas or over 200,000 verse lines, totaling approximately 1.8 million words.
Milman Parry and Albert Lord, early 20th-century scholars, demonstrated that the Homeric epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form. Their study of living oral epic traditions in the Balkans revealed that oral epics are constructed in short episodes of equal status.
Ancient Greek epics were composed in dactylic hexameter, while ancient Sumerian epics used no poetic meter. Sumerian epics derived rhythm from constant repetition and parallelism instead of consistent metrical schemes.
The Kalevala meter is a form of trochaic tetrameter thought to have originated during the Proto-Finnic period. The Finnish and Estonian national epics, the Kalevala and Kalevipoeg, are written in this form.