Abstract. Ihara initiated to study a certain Galois representation which may be seen as an arithmetic analogue of the Artin representation of a pure braid group. We pursue the analogies in Ihara theory further and give foundational results, following after some issues and their inter-relations in the theory of braids and links such as Milnor invariants, Johnson homomorphisms, Magnus-Gassner cocycles and Alexander invariants, and study relations with arithmetic in Ihara theory.