Editing Ramayana (section)

==Dating==
[[File:Avatars.jpg|thumb|Rama (left third from top) depicted in the [[Dashavatara]], the ten avatars of [[Vishnu]]. Painting from [[Jaipur]], now at the [[Victoria and Albert Museum]]]]

Scholarly estimates of the earliest stage of the available text range from the 7th–5th to 5th–4th centuries BCE,{{sfn|Goldman|1984|p=20–22}}<ref name="Brockington-1998"/> with later stages extending  to the 3rd century CE.<ref name="Brockington-1998">{{harvnb|Brockington|1998|pp=[https://books.google.com/books?id=HR-_LK5kl18C&pg=PA379 379ff].}}</ref> According to [[Robert P. Goldman]] (1984), the oldest parts of the ''Ramayana'' date to the early [[7th century BC|7th century BCE]].{{sfn|Goldman|1984|p=23|loc="[W]e feel that it is extremely unlikely that the archetype of the Valmiki Ramayana can be much earlier than the beginning of the seventh century B.C., although it is impossible to demonstrate this with any sort of rigor"}} The core parts, states Goldman, cannot have been composed later than the 6th or 5th century BCE, due to the narrative neither mentioning Buddhism (founded in the 5th century BCE) nor the prominence of [[Magadha (Mahajanapada)|Magadha]] (which rose to prominence in the 7th century BCE). The text also mentions [[Ayodhya (Ramayana)|Ayodhya]] as the capital of [[Kosala]], rather than its later name of Saketa or its successor capital of [[Shravasti]].{{sfn|Goldman|1984|loc=p. 21–22: "[I]n the Balakanda, as in the central five books of the epic, the kingdom of Kosala is represented as being at the height of its power and prosperity, governed from a major urban settlement called Ayodhya, [o]nly at the very end of the Uttara-kanda, [the] epilogue to the poem [w]e find reference to Sravasti as a successor capital. [A]s Jacobi also pointed out, the capital city of the unified realm of Kosala is invariably known as Ayodhya in the epic and never by the name Saketa, the name by which it comes to be known in much of the Buddhist and later literature"}} In terms of narrative time, the action of the ''Ramayana'' predates the ''[[Mahabharata]]''. {{harvp|Goldman|Sutherland Goldman|2022}} consider the Ramayana's oldest surviving version was composed around 500 BCE.<ref>{{harvnb|Goldman|Sutherland Goldman|2022|p=3}}: "The oldest surviving version of the great tale of Rāma, and the one that is doubtless the direct or indirect source of all of the hundreds and perhaps thousands of other versions of the story, is the monumental, mid-first millennium BCE epic poem in some twenty-five thousand Sanskrit couplets attributed to Vālmīki."</ref>

Books two to six are the oldest portion of the epic, while the first and last books (''[[Balakanda]]'' and ''[[Uttara Kanda]]'', respectively) consider to be later additions. Style differences and narrative contradictions between these two volumes and the rest of the epic have led scholars since Hermann Jacobi toward this consensus.{{sfnm|1a1=Goldman|1y=1984|1pp=14–18|2a1=Rao|2y=2014|2p=2}}