Ashtadhyayi Sanskrit treatise on grammar was written in the 6th to 5th century BCE by the Indian grammarian Panini. This work set the linguistic stan… - Panini

We pass at once into the magnificent edifice which bears the name of Panini as its architect and which justly commands the wonder and admiration of everyone who enters, and which, by the very fact of its sufficing for all the phenomenon which language presents, bespeaks at once the marvelous ingenuity of its inventor and his profound penetration of the entire material of the language.

The current language Pāṇini describes is very close in structure to the late Vedic found in certain Brāhmaṇa texts. As noted earlier, scholars have recognized other varieties of Sanskrit. Epic Sanskrit is so called because it is represented principally in the two epics, Mahābhārata (“Great Epic of the Bhārata Dynasty”) and Rāmāyaṇa (“Romance of Rāma”). In the latter the term saṃskṛta ‘adorned, cultivated, purified (by grammar)’ is encountered, possibly for the first time with reference to the language. The date of composition for the core of early Epic Sanskrit is considered to be in the centuries just preceding the Common Era.

While Pāṇini's work is purely grammatical and lexicographic, cultural and geographical inferences can be drawn from the vocabulary he uses in examples, and from his references to fellow grammarians, which show he was a northwestern person. New deities referred to in his work include Vasudeva (4.3.98). The concept of dharma is attested in his example sentence dharmam carati "he observes the law" (cf. Taittiriya Upanishad 1.11).