4.1 Kirat Period (the proto-history)

The earliest polity's law: the oral-tradition custom — the tribal council's justice (the mangpa-type elders' adjudication); the customary norms (the land's-and-community's rules); the written record's absence making the CUSTOM the era's whole law; the kirant tradition's legal significance (the indigenous-and-communal justice's deep root — the modern local-justice-and-guthi institutions' ancestry). 4.2 Lichchhavi Period (c. 300-880 AD) The first documented state: the inscriptions' law (the abhilekh corpus — the king's-and-court's orders preserved in stone); the administrative law's faces (the land-grants, the tax rules, the officials' duties — the kuther, sholla, ligwal, mapchok functionaries: the specialised royal functionaries of the inscriptions, the proto-bureaucracy); the Sanskritic-and-Indian legal culture's early reception (the Hindu polity's craft); the guilds'-and-villages' self-governance; the era's significance: the WRITTEN administrative legality's birth. 4.3 Malla Period (c. 1200-1769) and Legal Reformation The valley-and-hill kingdoms: the manthali justice (the court-assemblies — the king's-and-elders' public adjudication); the written thitis (the custom-articles — the local codes-and-regulations of the towns-and-guilds); the Newar urban self-governance (the guthi system's classical age — the community institutions' self-law: the kin-and-temple-and-land organisations); the Dharmashastra's penetration (the Hindu jurisprudence's cultural establishment); the Malla legal reformation (the urban-and-commercial regulation's flowering — the market-and-craft rules); the era's significance: the custom-to-code movement's first stirrings (the thiti tradition as the Muluki Ain's ancestor).