Uroja is a distinctly Cham deity whose name, drawn from a Sanskrit word for the chest or bosom, marks 'the one born of the breast'. Epigraphers reading the Mỹ Sơn and Kauthara inscriptions found this figure invoked as an autochthonous ancestor from whom the Cham dynasties claimed descent, a divine progenitor grafted onto the imported Śaiva theology and closely bound to the mother-goddess cult of the land. Uroja belongs to the oldest indigenous stratum of Cham belief, an earth-and-ancestry principle predating and underlying the Sanskritic gods; scholars differ over the deity's precise gender and function, but agree that Uroja embodies the native root of Cham sacred kingship.