Dynastic History|Changu Narayan — Where the Valley's Record Begins

The hill above the Manohara river carries a stone that fixes a date. The inscription cut into it was set up in the name of Manadeva, a king of the Licchavi house, in 464 — described in Nepali scholarship as the earliest inscription surviving from the country's ancient period, and the point at which the Kathmandu Valley's dynastic record stops being a matter of chronicle and becomes a matter of text on stone. On the reading followed in that scholarship, the Sanskrit commemorates campaigns east and west and records that the king dissuaded his mother Rajyavati from following her husband onto the pyre; the same account has him giving the shrine a Garuda and setting the stone beside it. Some twenty inscriptions are counted from his reign.

What is claimed for the valley before that comes from vamshavali chronicles compiled centuries afterwards. They are documents about the courts that commissioned them, and they are not registers of what happened.

Reading the stone is itself a nineteenth-century story. Bhagwanlal Indraji and Georg Buhler published the text in Bombay in 1885. In 1899 Sylvain Levi, refused entry to the compound by the temple's priests, worked from rubbings supplied to him and published his reading in Le Nepal; Gnoli, Naraharinath, Vajracharya, Joshi and Khanal have all revised it since.

Changu Narayan is a working shrine and one of the seven monument zones UNESCO inscribed as the Kathmandu Valley in 1979. The complex was damaged in the earthquake of April 2015 and repaired afterwards. The stone stands in the open, red with offering powder.

📸 Cover: the inscribed stone at Changu Narayan, identified by the photographer as Manadeva's column, Gerd Eichmann, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons