EARLY INHABITANTS OF WESTERN ASIA—LUSCHAN. 559 
convincing; Weissenberg should have shown his friends photos of 
Greeks, Armenians, and Persians. The number of correct identifica- 
tions would then have been certainly very much smaller, and it would 
have become evident that what Weissenberg takes to be “ Jewishness”’ 
is nothing more than oriental, pure and simple. I shall refer to this 
statement toward the end of this paper, and meanwhile only want to 
advert.to Table II, on page 571, showing in the thick line the cephalic 
indices of 1,222 Jews; 52 per cent of these were Sephardim, whom I 
measured at Smyrna, at Constantinople, at Makri, and in Rhodes; 
the rest were Ashkenazim measured by myself when I was one of the 
medical assistants in the Allgemeine Krankenhaus at Vienna, Austria. 
Besides these two large groups there are other Jews in Turkey and 
in Egypt, who have been there since the early times of the Diaspora 
and longer. But they are few in number and I had no opportunity 
to measure any of them. 
H. GYPSIES, APTAL, ETC. 
Asmall but highly interesting group is formed by the Gypsies and 
their kin. About 30,000 of them are said to infect Turkey with their 
disorder and inclination for theft and larceny. On the other side, 
they are cheerful company, men and women, not seldom with a cer- 
tain beauty.1. They make baskets and sieves; the men are mostly 
blacksmiths and shrewd horsedealers. They are never settled in 
houses, but wander with their goat-hair tents, in winter time on the 
plains, in summer high up in the mountains. I once met a small 
“village” of about 10 Gypsy tents as high upas 8,000feet. Unhappily, 
nothing is known about their early migrations and history; they speak 
Turkish in Asia Minor, Arabic in Syria, and keep secret their own lan- 
guage with so much care that my various and repeated efforts to get 
at least a few phrases turned out a complete failure.? 
In northern Syria I met a kind of Gypsies calling themselves 
‘“‘Aptal”; they lay a certain stress upon their not being Gypsies, but 
I could find no real difference either in their somatic qualities or in 
their ethnographic or social standing. Some of them often wander 
about like dervishes in groups of four or five, and with a large red or 
green banner; others are jugglers and conjurers and play tricks with 
serpents. 
Gypsies never, or hardly ever, mix with other tribes in Syria or 
' Asia Minor. They naturally pretend to be Mohammedans and have 
Islamic names, but they are always treated with a certain contempt 
1Cf. some types I published in Petersen and von Luschan, Reisen in Lykien Milyas und Kibyratis, 
Wien, C. Gerold’s Sohn, 1889. 
2 Henry Minor Huxley (American Anthropologist, vol. 4, 1902, p. 49) examined at Jerusalem a few 
gypsies of Syria that spoke Arabic, ““but among themselves fluently Gypsy. Many of their words have ex- 
actly the same forms as are found in Hindu Gypsy words.’”’ I do not know if this statement is confirmed 
by other explorers. 
