Valmiki

Valmiki is a legendary poet and Hindu sage traditionally revered, on the basis of the text's own internal attribution, as the author of the Ramayana, one of the two great Sanskrit epics of Hinduism, earning him the title Adi Kavi, or first poet. The Ramayana, a work of roughly 24,000 verses across seven books telling the story of Prince Rama of Ayodhya and the abduction of his wife Sita by the demon king Ravana, is estimated by scholars to have taken shape between the eighth century BCE and the third century CE, though its original date of composition and the historical reality of Valmiki himself cannot be established with certainty, and the text as it survives shows evidence of centuries of interpolation and redaction. Valmiki is described in tradition as a contemporary of Rama and is sometimes credited as the first author in history to write himself into his own composition.