The Bhagavata Purana is one of the most highly regarded and variegated of Hindu sacred texts. Although essentially a work of the puranic genre, the Bhagavata stands out among the Puranas, or sacred histories, in several important ways. Among these are its coherent narrative structure, its high poetic quality, its philosophical sophistication, and its extensive development of bhakti theology. As such, this work of over 14,000 Sanskrit verses ranks, along with the Ramayana and Mahabharata, as central to the contemporary Hindu corpus of sacred texts in the Sanskrit language.