Documenta Nepalica is the digital platform of the research project Documents on the History of Religion and Law of Pre-modern Nepal at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. It provides information about legal and administrative documents, inscriptions, and other primary sources that are central to the study of religion, law, and society in pre-modern Nepal.

The platform primarily consists of two interconnected components: 

• Catalogue Database – a comprehensive catalogue containing metadata on both published and unpublished documents.
• Editions Platform – a collection of digital, TEI-XML encoded editions of selected documents, accompanied by translations and/or detailed summaries.

The catalogue database, orginally designed to record the handwritten documents microfilmed by the NGMPP, now additionally contains descriptive metadata of documents from other archives and private collections, including:

• Josef Peter Rindfleisch Collection (identifier prefix: PCRIND)
• Documents from Chāy Bāhāḥ Maṭha (identifier prefix: PCCHA)
• Tsum Valley documents (courtesy of Nadine Plachta; identifier prefix: TSUM)
• Inscriptions recorded by the Nepal Heritage Documentation Project (identifier prefix: NHDP)
• Inscriptions from Vaṃ Bāhāḥ, Patan (identifier prefix: PCVAM)
• Regmi Research Collection (identifier prefix: RRC)

Editions

Documents are selected for editing according to the research interests of the project team. They are transcribed and edited with minimal editorial intervention in order to preserve the characteristics of the original sources as faithfully as possible.

The editions are encoded in accordance with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines and are made available as XML files. Thematically related documents are grouped into curated collections that provide a foundation for further historical and philological research.

The research unit also publishes selected editions, complete with DOI, in cooperation with Heidelberg University Library on the Heidelberger digitale Editionen (heiEDITIONS).

Search and Research Tools

Documenta Nepalica offers powerful search and browsing capabilities across both the Catalogue Database and the Editions Platform. Users may search each dataset independently or explore them together using a wide range of metadata and content-based criteria. In addition to a simple keyword search, advanced search options allow multiple parameters to be combined for more precise queries.

Catalogue entries and search results can be bookmarked, collected in My list, and exported as a text file for further research.

Research Topics

Thematically related documents are organized into curated collections around specific historical, legal, and religious themes. As the platform continues to grow, new collections are regularly added. Browse the range of thematic document collections on the Research Topics page.

Editorial Principles

In order to give the dated features of the languages in which the documents were written the full weight they deserve, the editorial approach adopted is one that seeks preferentially to reproduce texts as closely as possible rather than to normalize them. The observable variability in terms of orthography and grammar is respected as being an integral part of the language. All documents are treated as codex unicus, even if in some cases certified copies are extant.

Editorial Symbols

[...]	lost text
[?]	illegible text
[रा]	editorial addition
⟪ ⟫	scribal addition
Crossed-out text	scribal deletion
{.}	editorial deletion

Display Modes

The XML editions can be viewed in three different display modes.

Diplomatic

This mode reproduces the original document as faithfully as possible. It preserves all orthographic, palaeographic, and layout features, including:

• diacritical marks such as the nukta (़);
• original line breaks;
• formatting features, such as the scriptura continua found in most documents; and
• graphical elements, including the middle dot (•), occasionally used to separate words, as well as macrons and other horizontal lines that function as placeholders or structural devices.

Word Breaks

This mode is identical to the diplomatic display except that word boundaries are introduced to facilitate reading.

Annotated Edition

The aim being to achieve a balance between readability and texts that remain as close to the original as possible, the editorial techniques that have been applied to the documents introduce minimally invasive normalizations and corrections.

Punctuation

In order to make the editions and their relation to the translations more accessible for the reader, punctuation has been normalized. Middle dots represented in the diplomatic edition are dropped. The various types of macrons and lines are uniformly represented by “- - -”. Daṇḍas are introduced to mark the end of a sentence or a sentence-like syntactic unit. Hyphenation is introduced in cases where a single word runs over into the next line.

Orthography

Original spellings are largely retained. The only regularizations concern introducing a differentiation between ṣ and kh, and between v and b on the basis of standard modern spellings, following the Nepālī Bṛhat Śabdakośa (Parājulī et al. 1995), regardless of whether or not these reflect actual differences in pronunciation at the time when the documents were written. The documents themselves mostly use ṣ and v, and occasionally distinguish v from b by adding a nuktā to the former. Such nuktās, along with others sporadically employed to distinguish ya from pa, are omitted.

In parts of the texts written in in khasa-kurā (later known as Nepali), typical orthographic variants (cf. Riccardi 1971: 18–23) have not been normalized. This includes, in particular:

• alternative representations of the vowels i and u (i alternating with ī or e; ya/yā with e; and u with ū; Riccardi 1971: 18–19);
• sporadic non-standard use of visarga (ibid.: 19);
• inconsistent use of anusvāra, anunāsika, and class nasals (ibid.: 20); and
• further orthographic variants, including k/g, kṣ/ch, j/y, ḍ/d/r, ṭ/t, r/l, and ś/s (ibid.: 20–23).

Uncertain readings and editorial corrections are indicated by underdots beneath the relevant characters and are further explained in pop-up annotations.

Transliteration

When the transliteration display is selected, daṇḍas are rendered as full stops. The editions employ transliteration rather than transcription; consequently, inherent a is retained in all positions, including word-final and medial positions, irrespective of its historical pronunciation. The same transliteration principles apply to all textual quotations in the Abstract, Translation, Commentary, and Footnotes.