the coincidence arises in another way. Karana is the name applied to a particular class of mixt blood, whose special occupation was writing and accounts.  But the prior sense of the word seems to have been “clever, skilled,” and hence a writer or scribe.  In this sense we find Karani applied in Ibn Batuta’s day to a ship’s clerk, and it is used in the same sense in the Ain Akbari.  Clerkship is also the predominant occupation of the East-Indians, and hence the term Karani is applied to them from their business, and not from their mixt blood.  We shall see hereafter that there is a Tartar term Arghun, applied to fair children born of a Mongol mother and white father; it is possible that there may have been a correlative word like Karaun (from Kara, black) applied to dark children born of Mongol father and black mother, and that this led Marco to a false theory.

[Major Sykes (Persia) devotes a chapter (xxiv.) to The Karwan Expedition in which he says:  “Is it not possible that the Karwanis are the Caraonas of Marco Polo?  They are distinct from the surrounding Baluchis, and pay no tribute.”—­H.  C.]

[Illustration:  Portrait of a Hazara.]

Let us turn now to the name of Nogodar.  Contemporaneously with the Karaunahs we have frequent mention of predatory bands known as Nigudaris, who seem to be distinguished from the Karaunahs, but had a like character for truculence.  Their headquarters were about Sijistan, and Quatremere seems disposed to look upon them as a tribe indigenous in that quarter.  Hammer says they were originally the troops of Prince Nigudar, grandson of Chaghatai, and that they were a rabble of all sorts, Mongols, Turkmans, Kurds, Shuls, and what not.  We hear of their revolts and disorders down to 1319, under which date Mirkhond says that there had been one-and-twenty fights with them in four years.  Again we hear of them in 1336 about Herat, whilst in Baber’s time they turn up as Nukdari, fairly established as tribes in the mountainous tracts of Karnud and Ghur, west of Kabul, and coupled with the Hazaras, who still survive both in name and character.  “Among both,” says Baber, “there are some who speak the Mongol language.”  Hazaras and Takdaris (read Nukdaris) again occur coupled in the History of Sind. (See Elliot, I. 303-304.) [On the struggle against Timur of Toumen, veteran chief of the Nikoudrians (1383-84), see Major David Price’s Mahommedan History, London, 1821, vol. iii. pp. 47-49, H. C.] In maps of the 17th century, as of Hondius and Blaeuw, we find the mountains north of Kabul termed Nochdarizari, in which we cannot miss the combination Nigudar-Hazarah, whencesoever it was got.  The Hazaras are eminently Mongol in feature to this day, and it is very probable that they or some part of them are the descendants of the Karaunahs or the Nigudaris, or of both, and that the origination of the bands so called, from the scum