Oriental Studies Author:Hugh Nevill Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: STUDY No. 2.-INDIAN ETHNOLOGY. NOTE I. ON THE CHANGES IN MAGADHA. I PROPOSE to distinguish the early inhabitants of Magadha from the Nagan tribes of Ori... more »ssa, and the Ethiopians to the South, and to regard them as a race called Kuru, Kuru Vara, which formed the middle class, while the noble oligarchy was formed by the Pali Arians, and their children by the daughters of the Japhetic Kuru- Vara chiefs. We must first analyse this word Kura. It may be written Kura, Hura, Ura, Sura, at pleasure, and this comes from a root Kur, Hur, Sur, Ur, which means primarily God the Fermenter, the Moon, and then the Sun, and later still, a citizen, from the illustrious Babylonian Ur, a city. The Kura were then either emigrants from Ur, or they were children, that is worshippers, of God the Fermenter, or in all probablity they were both. One section of their tribe was distinguished as the Kukura or Royal Kura, and was of course of the Suriyawansa; after a short time Kura passed into a secondary sense of " people," and as such is preserved in the modern Mand, Kura, a boy. At this stage the race began to meet the Ha- mitic Ethiopians of Western and Central India, and absorbing some as a servile caste, these gradually became recognized as the Kura, the real Kura becoming Kurawara or Kurawa. It was now the Arians of Pali race reached them, and amalgamated with the Kuravara to form the Kshatraya or Rajput class. Under its Kshatraya kings, for long ages Magadha was but a sub-kingdom of their Indian Empire, and we must turn to the Puranams for the deta1ls of its subsequent separate existence as an independent power. Sir Wm. Jones, Journ., R. A. S. Vol. I, first introduced to us the dynasties of Magadha from this source, and his labors may be summarised thus :— Dynasty. No. of Kings. Date. ...« less