Give a short account of the Gopala, Mahispala and Kirata periods, assessing their historical value.

History is the disciplined study of the human past — not "everything that happened", but the evidenced and interpreted account of it. E. H. Carr (What is History?, 1961): history is "an unending dialogue between the present and the past" — the historian asks new questions of old evidence. Leopold von Ranke (19th century) demanded history "as it actually was" (wie eseigentlich gewesen) — source-critical, documentary.