Kirati

The Kirati are a cluster of Tibeto-Burman peoples of the eastern Himalaya, including the Rai and Limbu, in eastern Nepal, Sikkim and Darjeeling. Sanskrit texts call these mountain peoples Kirata, and Kirati chiefs were among the earliest rulers of the Kathmandu Valley: according to tradition their king Yalambar founded a Kirat dynasty there before the Licchavi conquest.

In the far east the Limbu country, Limbuwan, was divided into ten kingdoms, of which Morang was the strongest, and the Limbu language acquired its own Sirijunga script in the ninth century. Kirati society was ordered by the oral Mundhum; its people worshipped nature and ancestors through shamans and celebrated the seasonal Sakela festivals.

The independent Kirati kingdoms ended in 1774, when Gorkha armies conquered Limbuwan after seventeen battles; the treaty preserved a measure of local self-rule under the kipat land system.