40 RAWLINSON; the gipsies. • [Feb. 25, 185G. 



chief were those named by the Greeks, the Geta3 and the Sacee, or as they 

 .termed themselves, giving a plural ending to the nouns, Jatdn and Sagdn.* 

 They were famous as musicians and workers in iron, but were also notorious 

 for their turbulent and depraved habits. Bahram Gur, in the fourth century, 

 first moved a colony of them into Persia, and settled them in the modern pro- 

 vince of Kennan. Eastern writers, in describing this settlement, usually call 

 the colonists Lulls, or Luris (which is the same name as the Indian Lodi, 

 whence Lodiana, &c. &c., the Lodis being a branch of the Jats) ; bat the more 

 authentic historians, such as Ihn Mukaffd, &c., have preserved the name of_ 

 Zatdn. Parties of these Indian Jats were still in the Kerman mountains when 

 the Kufs and Behis (modern Kooch and Belooch) first settled there, about the 

 time of the Hejrah. Other parties of them, however, had migrated westward 

 and established themselves in Susiana, where they gave their name of Zat to 

 a district in the vicinity of Ahtudz. 



During the first century of Islam, the Zats or Jatdn of Susiana were joined 

 by large parties of their countrymen from the mouths of the Indus, who came 

 to the Persian Gulf as buccaneers and pirates, and subsequently settled in the 

 Ghaldsean marshes. Here they increased and multiplied, and all the Arabic 

 writers of the second century of Islam, speak of the Zats about the confluence 

 of the Tigris and Euphrates, as living in a state of almost complete indepen- 

 dence, defying the authority of the Caliph, and extending their depredations on 

 all sides. They were also notorious heretics, still apparently clinging to their 

 old Indian idolatry. 



At length in a.h. 220, their turbulence becoming intoleralJ.e, Moatesem, son 

 of Mamun and grandson of Earun al liasMd, sent his famous general AJif 

 with an overwhelming force to subdue the Zats and remove them from the 

 country. Ten thousand of them perished in their attempt to resist the Caliph's 

 troops, and the remainder, with their wives and children, were forcibly deported 

 and brought to Baghdad. From hence, in the first instance, they were marched 

 to Kliannikin, on the Persian border ; but still continuing unmanageable, they 

 were in the sequel transplanted in a body to the Cilician frontier to be employed 

 as a defence against the Greeks, who were then constantly at war with the 

 Mohammedans along the skirts of Taurus. The Jatdn and Sagdn thus re- 

 mained encamped about the pass of Adana, between the cities of Tarsus, 

 Mopsuesta, and Anazarba, for above one hundred years. It was in a.h. 351 

 (a.d. 962) that the Greeks recovered for a brief period their footing in Cilicia, 

 and one of their first acts was to remove into the interior, about Iconium and 

 Cesarea, the fierce tribes who had so long harassed them on the frontier. As 

 the Seljukians pressed forward into Asia Minor from the eastward during the 

 twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it is probable that the Jatdn and Sagdn fell back 

 before them towards the Bosphorns, and that at the beginning of the fourteenth 

 century they crossed into Thrace. Shortly afterwards they first historically 

 appear in Bohemia. 



When it is considered that we are thus able to trace a large body of Indian 

 colonists from the banks of the Indus to the shores of the Bosphorus, in an 

 almost continuous series of movements ; that the names of these colonists are 

 everywhere given as Jatdn and Sagdn, which so nearly correspond with the 

 terms Oitano and Tsigani, by which (under various corruptions) the Gipsies 

 are universally known both in Europe and Asia ; and that tlie Gipsies, wherever 

 they are found, exhibit all those characteristic signs of language, colour, coun- 

 tenance, and habit which should belong to the Jatdn and Sagdn of history, it 



* The Jats are well known to all Indian ethnographers ; they form at tlie pre- 

 sent day the great mass of the population of the Punjab. The name of the Saca>, 

 or Sd.jdii, is als) prese ved in Sagistd'i, now called Sclst<tn,, in Dch Z rngi of the Paro- 

 pamisus, and in the various Zinjdns of Persia. 



