HISTORY CONTEXTS
History For a backward Himalayan statelet, squeezed uncomfortably between India and China, Nepal has played a surprisingly pivotal role in Asian history. In its early days, the country reared the Buddha; much later, its remarkable conquests led it into wars with Tibet and Britain. Its name and recorded history go back nearly three thousand years, although it has existed as a nation for barely two hundred: before 1769, “Nepal” referred only to a kingdom based in the Kathmandu Valley. Some rural people still talk about it as such.
The rise of the Himalayas All Nepal’s history – its peoples, its politics and its development – is founded on its extraordinary landscape. The Himalayas, which march across the country’s northern border, are a kind of cataclysmic, geo-scale crumple zone. Despite being astonishingly young – they began rising a mere 55 million years ago – they’re already so high that they have created the desertified Tibetan plateau, parts of which lie within the northwestern borders of Nepal. The body and cultural heart of Nepal – and its capital, Kathmandu – lies in the Middle Hills, or pahaad, a mightily upswelling belt of green created as much by water as plate tectonics. Beginning deep within Tibet, the Karnali, Kali Gandaki and Arun rivers have carved some of the world’s deepest and grandest gorges through the country. Towards Nepal’s southern edge, the geologically more recent uprising of the Mahabharat Lek and Churia Hills has formed a last barrier, forcing the great southbound rivers to make lengthy east–west detours before they flood out across the flat Terai region, and on into India.
Ancient migrations According to the Newars, who it’s believed have lived there longest of all, the Kathmandu Valley was once filled with a primordial lake. Geologists agree that a lake dried up some 100,000 years ago. Whether the valley itself was inhabited is uncertain, but hilltop shrines such as Swayambunath may once have existed to rise above the waterline. Archeologists have found simple stone tools in the Churia Hills, to the south, which date back at least 100,000 years. Folk myths suggest that most of Nepal’s current ethnic groups arrived as migrant hunter-gatherers. (Many preserved those ways of life until around the seventeenth century.) Semi-mythological genealogies talk about the warlike Kiranti (or Kirati) people who, by the sixth or seventh century BC were controlling the eastern hills – where they remain today – and the Kathmandu Valley. By this time, Hindus from ipi8hfBu+Fu1Tqp6g5eaALs= the south were clearing the malarial jungle of the Terai, founding the city-states of 65 million years ago
100,000 years ago
30,000 years ago
c.400 BC
As the Indian tectonic plate collides with the Asian plate, the impact starts to lift the Himalayas.
The primordial lake in the Kathmandu Valley dries up.
Humans using tools live in the Kathmandu Valley.
Gautama Buddha is born at Lumbini.
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