a helot state, or driven in among the aborigines on the north and south of the valley. In the lower part of the valley (Ganges) progress appears to have been slow and partial. They (the Aryans) did not completely and permanently subjugate the native tribes, or dislodge them. They made conquests and founded kingdoms, but the mass of the population remained non-Aryan, and the Aryan dynasties were frequently supplanted by native ones. The Aryan princes do not appear to have been able to maintain their power in Behar and Bengal. In the fourth century B.C. the celebrated Chandragupta (from 315 to 391 B.C.) a Sudra (i.e. one of the native non-Aryan races) became King of Magadha, and no purely Aryan dynasty was ever re-established. Chandragupta and his successors were surnamed Maurya[1] from his mother Mura, but the name was probably a tribal one. It is still found as an ethnic and geographical name in the adjacent Himalayas (Murang Murmi) * * But the priests, the religion, the civilization and the literature of the Aryans retained their power. The native languages were deeply Aryanised and the physical character of the population was greatly modified. * * Kocch, Bodo, and other purer remnants of the old race (i.e. Gangetic) are evidently in part, and in some of them in a great degree, indebted for the improvement in their physical type, when compared with the Tibetan and Chinese to the fact of their having been for more than 3000 years in contact with Aryans and Aryanised Indians although it is probable they had assumed their distinctive character at a much
- ↑ This word Maurya, has been used by some writers as a synonym for Maori. But those who think so have first to show that Maori was a racial name for the whole of the Polynesians. As a matter of fact it is only New Zealanders and Rarotongans who use the word as descriptive of themselves.
