Nepal, April 29 -- Officials of the Nepal government were handed rare archival documents during a ceremony in Heidelberg on 24 April this week. The collection, assembled by Bavarian collector Josef Peter Walter Rindfleisch between 1980 and 2000, had been previously entrusted to the Indologist Axel Michaels of Heidelberg University with the explicit aim of eventual repatriation.

Scholars say the holdings which include 465 Newari palm-leaf rolls, most of them bearing clay seals and dating to the medieval Malla period are likely one of the largest collections of Nepali palmleaf rolls outside Nepal.

The archive also includes royal decrees, court records, Sanskrit manuscripts, and a wide range of historical materials-from legal documents an...