Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Mahabharata contains over 100,000 shlokas and more than 200,000 individual lines, totaling roughly 1.8 million words. That makes it approximately ten times the combined length of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and about four times the length of the Ramayana.
Authorship of the Mahabharata is traditionally attributed to the sage Vyasa, who is also a major figure within the epic itself. Vyasa is said to have composed the core version of 8,800 verses, known as the Jaya.
The bulk of the Mahabharata was probably compiled between the 3rd century BCE and the 3rd century CE. The oldest preserved parts are not thought to be much older than around 400 BCE, and the text likely reached its final form by the early Gupta period, around the 4th century CE.
The Bhagavad Gita is a philosophical dialogue between Krishna and the warrior Arjuna, delivered on the battlefield just before the Kurukshetra War begins. It appears in the Bhishma Parva, the sixth book of the Mahabharata, in chapters 25 through 42.
The Critical Edition was produced by scholars at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, who compared manuscripts from across India and abroad over 47 years, from 1919 to 1966. The edition runs to 13,000 pages across 19 volumes and is the standard reference text used in current Mahabharata studies.
A Javanese version called the Kakawin Bharatayuddha was composed in the 11th century under the patronage of King Dharmawangsa, who ruled from 990 to 1016. The tradition spread from Java to Bali and became the foundation for Javanese literature, the wayang wong dance drama form, and wayang shadow puppet performances.