The Sattasai or 'Seven Hundred' is an anthology of poems in Maharashtri Prakrit, a literary dialect of Sanskrit. The compilation is attributed to Hala, a king of the Satavahana dynasty in the Deccan in the first century AD but the collection as we have it probably dates from the 3rd to 5th centuries. It is the earliest surviving anthology of poems from ancient India.

Most of the poems are about various aspects of love-love dissembled, love reciprocated, love fulfilled, love betrayed and so on. Each two-line poem depicts an emotion or a situation, tragic or comic or tragicomic. Usually the point of view expressed is the woman's. The presentation can be so oblique that the reader has to guess the underlying meaning. Besides love there are poems about village life, animals, the seasons and the god of love. There are general maxims, purely descriptive verses and conceits.

We have based our translation on the critical edition of Albrecht Weber (1881) apart from a few instances where we have preferred a variant MS reading. We hope to offer a rather more nuanced interpretation than hitherto of the anthology as a whole, as well as of individual poems. This will be the first annotated translation into English of this major work of classical Indian literature.