Dynastic History|Kasthamandap — The Chronicle and the Ground Beneath It

The building that gave Kathmandu its name came down on 25 April 2015. What followed was not only a rebuilding but an excavation. Nepal's Department of Archaeology opened the cleared platform with archaeologists from Durham and the University of Stirling, and soils from the foundations went to Stirling for radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence dating.

The results moved the building several centuries. Its construction had traditionally been placed in the twelfth century; before the dig, as the project's own account puts it, the Kasthamandap had been known only through its standing remains and local tradition. The dated foundations put it up between the early seventh and the early ninth century, with a lion-headed capital from the monument dated to the fifth or sixth, and a substantial rebuilding showing in the eleventh or twelfth.

The court turns up in the finds rather than in the fabric. Copper-plate inscriptions naming the fourteenth-century king Jayasthiti Malla were recovered from one of the pillars, and manuscripts dated in the Nepal Sambat era — years 454, 499 and 543, which on that era's epoch of 879 fall in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries — carry regulations for the Pachali Bhairav procession. This was never a palace. It was a public shelter at the edge of the royal square, and what the dynasty left inside it was paperwork about a festival.

Three storeys of timber stand again on Maru, at the mouth of Kathmandu Durbar Square, rebuilt to the recorded form.

📸 Cover: the rebuilt Kasthamandap, photographed in 2023 — reconstruction, not original fabric. Chainwit., CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons