CAIRN.
Gnaj, HIND. I Birah, . . .
A heap of stones or tumulus piled over the resting - place of the ancient dead, in different parts of S. India. Prior to the Buddhist stupas or topes, this seems to have been a common mode of covering the dead ; indeed, the tope is only a cairn regularly built. On the Neilgherry hills are found remains of cairns, barrows, cromlechs, kistvaens, and circles of upright loose stones. In the cairns or barrows, vases, cinerary urns, and other vessels of glazed pottery, are often found, which sonic times contain human bones, more or less charred, and mixed with ashes; sometimes a little animal charcoal alone. They are met with in almost every part of peninsular India, from Nagpur to Madura, in immense numbers on the Animally hills, a range on the south side of the great Coim batore gap, which forms the commencement and northern face of the Southern Ghats, those on the Animally being of a more advanced order and in better condition than the Neilgherry barrows. Similar remains are found in Circassia and Russia; and circles of stones surrounding ancient graves, are found on the southern Arabian coast, and in the Somali country in Africa. All around Hyderabad and Secunderabad, in the Dekhan, are great numbers of cairns; and many of these remains are at Rajan Kooloor, in Zorapur, and also at Siwarji, near Ferozabad, on the Bhima. Neither the hill people, the Toda and Kurubara, nor any Hindus, know anything about the race to which these remains belonged; and neither in Sanskrit literature, nor in that of the Dravidian languages, is there any tradition on the subject. The Tamil people generally call these cairns pand u kuri ; kuri means a pit or grave, and pandu refers to the Pandu or Pandava brothers, to whom so much of Hindu mythology relates. The resem blance of the barrows and their contents (with the cromlechs, etc.) to the remains which are discovered in the ancient seats of the Celtic race in Europe, is exact (Dr. Caldwell's Grammar). In India, the topes or tumuli of Kraku-chanda, Kanaka, and Kasyapa existed before the of Sakya ; and the ancient elemental deities of the Vedas preceded the worship of Dharma or con crete nature.
Kodi Kul, or umbrella stone, Topi Kul, cap or covering stone, and Pandu Kul or Pandu stones, are other names by which the cromlechs of Southern India are known to the people. The
Topi Kul is a large mushroom-shaped stone placed on the ground. Underneath it are urns of baked pottery, containing portions of human bones mixed with charcoal, and a fine powder or sand, in which also the urns had been placed. And whether with the Kodi Kul, the Topi Kul, the kistvaen or cairns, a foreign earth, i.e. an earth not belonging to the locality, is used to cover in the funeral urns. Mr. Babington was the first to notice them, about the year 1820. Underneath the Topi Kul he found a flat stone, and beneath it an urn or urns, resting in a shell corresponding to its shape, filled in with fine sand ; and on ledges near the urn, were remains of iron implements and weapons, with heads of various kinds, an iron tripod, a lamp, etc. In 1831 Captain Harkness found groups of cairns on the Saroni hill at Oota camund. They are low mounds of earth rising to the centre, surrounded by circular walls of dry stone, about 3 feet high, and about G to 8 feet in diameter. Underneath the surface earth was a pavement of large flat stones, resting on smaller stones, beneath which was a layer of fine brownish black mould, 2 feet in depth, intermixed with broken pottery, charcoal, broken clay, images of buffaloes, and with other soil of a blacker and finer kind. Below the covering flags were nume rous urns filled with black earth, bone, and char coal, some perfect, some broken.
Captain II. Congreve, 1847, also described these, and he claimed for them a Scytho-Celtic or Druidic origin, and identity with similar European remains. He found at Ootacamund and in the Neilgherries generally, cairns with single and double rows of stones round them, disposed in circles ; open temples of large rocks set on end, as at Abury in Wiltshire, and Rowldrich in Oxfordshire; single rocks as altars, surrounded by rough circular walls and rings of stones; barrows environed with a trench and mound ; and single stones 5 to 10 feet high, etc. Beneath the flagstones, remains were found as described by Captain Iiarkness. Captain Congreve found cromlechs at Acheny, near Kotagherry, in which the people said pigmies not a foot high had been buried. At Adi Raer Cottay, he found a group of the kistvaen, or closed cromlech ; and he said that there is not a relic of Druidism existing in England, the type of which he had not found on the Neilgherry hills.