The Kurukshetra war · Mahabharata questions
When did the Mahabharata war happen?
No date is established. Traditional reckoning places the war at the end of the Dvapara Yuga, around 3102 BCE. Historians who accept a historical kernel usually suggest a far later period, roughly 1000 to 900 BCE, on archaeological grounds. The disagreement is unresolved.
Three families of answer circulate, and they do not agree.
Traditional and calendrical: the Kali Yuga is reckoned to have begun with the departure of Krishna, thirty-six years after the war, and later astronomers fixed that beginning at 3102 BCE. Working backwards gives a war around 3138 BCE. This figure comes from the yuga system and from astronomical works of the fifth century CE and after, not from the epic itself, which gives no calendar date.
Astronomical reconstructions: the text describes eclipses, comets and planetary positions around the war, and many researchers have tried to match them to real sky configurations. The attempts produce dates spread over more than two millennia, from the fourth millennium BCE to the first, because the descriptions are poetic, inconsistent between manuscripts, and were added to over time. The method is legitimate; the results do not converge, which is the point worth knowing.
Archaeological: if a real conflict lies under the story, the material culture of the epic, iron weapons, chariots, the Painted Grey Ware settlements at Hastinapur and other named sites, fits the early first millennium BCE rather than the fourth millennium. Historians who accept a kernel generally suggest something around 1000 to 900 BCE, and note that a small clan feud would have grown into a war of eighteen armies in the retelling.
The epic keeps its own internal calendar instead: the war lasts eighteen days, Yudhishthira reigns thirty-six years before the Yadavas destroy themselves, and Parikshit and Janamejaya follow. Those spans are consistent inside the story and carry no external date.