Nepal

The territory of modern Nepal has been inhabited since prehistoric times, with archaeological evidence of human settlement in the Kathmandu Valley dating back several thousand years. The earliest documented inhabitants of the central hills were the Kirat people, whose semi-legendary dynasty is said to have ruled from around the seventh or eighth century BCE. The lowland Tarai region was the birthplace of Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, born at Lumbini in the sixth century BCE, an event that anchored the area in early South Asian religious history. From roughly the fourth century CE the Licchavi dynasty established a more centralised polity in the Kathmandu Valley, presiding over a flowering of Sanskritic culture, temple architecture, and trans-Himalayan trade with Tibet and the Indian plains.

The Licchavi period gave way after the ninth century to a transitional era and then to the Malla kingdoms, which dominated the valley from the twelfth century until the eighteenth. Under the later Mallas the valley fragmented into the rival city-states of Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhaktapur, each a centre of Newar artistic and commercial achievement. Outside the valley, dozens of small Hindu principalities, the Baise and Chaubise confederacies, controlled the western and central hills. This mosaic was unified by Prithvi Narayan Shah of Gorkha, who conquered the Kathmandu Valley in 1768 and 1769 and founded the Shah dynasty that would rule, with varying degrees of real power, for nearly 240 years. Subsequent Gorkhali expansion brought conflict with the British East India Company; the Anglo-Nepalese War of 1814 to 1816 ended with the Treaty of Sugauli, which fixed Nepal's borders close to their modern shape and opened the country to a permanent British residency, though Nepal was never formally colonised.

From 1846 the Rana family, beginning with Jung Bahadur Rana, reduced the Shah monarchs to ceremonial figures and ruled as hereditary prime ministers for more than a century, maintaining a deliberately isolationist policy. The Rana regime collapsed in 1951 after a movement led by King Tribhuvan in alliance with the Nepali Congress, restoring effective royal authority and opening the country to the outside world. A brief experiment with parliamentary democracy under King Mahendra ended in 1960, when he dismissed the elected government and instituted the partyless Panchayat system, which lasted until popular pressure forced a return to multiparty constitutional monarchy in 1990.

The new constitutional order was soon disrupted by the Maoist insurgency that began in 1996 and lasted a decade, claiming over 13,000 lives. The conflict was compounded by the 2001 royal massacre, in which most of the immediate royal family was killed, and by King Gyanendra's suspension of parliament in 2005. A peaceful mass movement in April 2006 forced the king to restore parliament, and a Comprehensive Peace Accord later that year ended the war. In 2008 the newly elected Constituent Assembly abolished the monarchy and declared Nepal a federal democratic republic.

After years of negotiation, a new constitution promulgated in September 2015 established Nepal as a secular, federal parliamentary republic divided into seven provinces. The country is governed by a bicameral Federal Parliament, with a ceremonial president as head of state and a prime minister as head of government, completing the transition from Himalayan kingdom to federal republic.