"Matsya Purana is that in which, for the sake of promulgating the Vedas, Vishnu, in the beginning of the Kalpa related to Manu the story of Narasimha and the events of seven Kalpas, that O, sages know to be the Matsya containing twenty thousand stanzas...the subjects of the Purana were communicated by Vishnu, in the form of a fish to Manu. The Purana, after the usual prologue open with the account of the Matsya or ‘fish’ Avatars of Vishnu, in which he preserves a king named Manu, with the seeds of all things, in an ark, from the waters of the inundation which in the season of Pralaya overspreads the world. This story is told in the Mahabharata, with reference to the Matsya as its authority; from which it might be inferred that the Purana was prior to the poem."