(IVI'SIKS 



487 



ti * the house or cave (not tent or caravan) is 



their permanent aln>de. Nay, it is CUIIOUM that, 

 though there certainly were Gypsy tent-dwellers 

 in Wallaehia iii 1370, at RatUbon in 1424, as there 

 are to dav in I'.-i-i.-i ,-upl America and in all inter- 



i liaie lands, still, as a rule, the early chroniclers 



ilciit us to Cypsy tents; ami the word for 

 tent' ilitlers in almost every Roman! dialect, 

 indeed is oftenest a l>orrowed term. 



There are few trades that ( iypsies have not some- 

 where or at some time turned their hands to. In 

 KiiulamI the writer has known them to follow the 

 railings oi clergyman, billiard -marker, Salvationist, 

 licit ing -man, quack-doctor, chimney-sweep, gun- 

 maker, pugilist, actor, carpenter, cabman, Ac., as 

 well as of hawker, knife-grinder, showman, and 

 the like. Hut everywhere the men follow the three 

 upecilically Gypsy callings of home-dealers (slave- 

 dealers in Brazil, too, formerly), musicians, and 

 workers in metal ; everywhere the women are 

 adepts at fortune-telling. Their musical talent 

 has rendered them famous as harpists in Wales, 

 a- -ingers in Moscow, as violinists in Hungary ; 

 and from Hungary since 1878 their fame has 

 extended to Paris, London, Liverpool, Edinburgh. 

 There are no such players of the czardas; still 

 l.is/t's theory that Hungary owes its national 

 music to the'Gypsies has been impugned by com- 

 petent authorities. What then of the paradoxical 

 claim, put forward by M. Bataillard, that Europe 

 at anyrate northern and western Europe is 

 indebted to prehistoric Gypsies for its knowledge 

 of metallurgy i.e. for everything that makes life 

 livable ? If we examine this claim, the paradox 

 .^iisibly diminishes. On the one hand, Sir John 

 l.nhbock, without a thought of the Gypsies, had in 

 1st;.") been led to the independent conclusion that 

 the art of making bronze was introduced into 

 Europe from the East by a small-handed race like 

 the Egyptians or the Hindus, a nomad race too, 

 who practised the self-same methods in different 

 lands, and who, whether acquainted or not with 

 iron, were exclusively workers in bronze. What 

 race this was he leaves an unsolved problem, 

 xcept that it certainly was not the Phoenicians. 

 On the other hand, the Gypsies of south-eastern 

 Europe and Asia Minor enjoy a practical monopoly 

 of metal-working. So exclusively is the smith s 

 a Gypsy (and therefore a degrading) craft in Mon- 

 tenegro that, when in 1872 the government estab- 

 lished an arsenal, no natives could be got to till its 

 well-paid posts. In 1880 Mr Hyde Clarke wrote in 

 a letter that ' over more than one saniak of the 

 Aidin viceroyalty the Gypsies have still a mono- 

 poly of ironworking, the naalband, or shoeing- 

 smith, being no smith in our sense at all. He is 

 supplied with shoes of various sizes by the Gypsies, 

 and only hammers them on.' In 1856 Mr Gardner, 

 consul at Jassy in Moldavia, described the Gypsies 

 as 'the blacksmiths and locksmiths of the country;' 

 in Transylvania, says Boner (186~>), 'Gypsies are 

 the best I'.-ii Tiers, and as blacksmiths generally they 

 excel. All the ironwork of a village is done by 

 them.' Add to this, and much more of the sort 

 mi-jlit be quoted, the fact that very many of the 

 early notices of (iypsies, some of which we have 

 cited, refer to their skill in metallurgy. Next, put 

 two and two together, though many important 

 links in the chain of reasoning are necessarily 

 omitted here for want of space. Suppose that 

 there were prehistoric Gypsies in Europe (and 

 history knows nought of their arrival), that they 

 were nomad smiths, like the komoilromoi of the 

 Ttli century A.D., the ' l>hmaelites' of the 12th cen- 

 tury, and the Hungarian Calderari who visited 

 Norway in 1874 ; that they were workers in bronze, 

 to the exclusion of iron, like the Gypsy ' Zlotars ' 

 to-day in eastern Gallicia (bell -founders these, like 



the Scotti-h tinkler of 1726, and goldsmith^ too, 

 like the komodrouioi) supposing all this, we nay, 

 then have we not possihlv identified tin* unknown 

 race, small -handed like the <JyptieB, and, like the 

 (iypsies immigrants from the East? An objection, 

 raised by the writer in 1878 t<> Bataillard's theory, 

 that in even < lyp.-y dialect of Europe nearly all 



di 



( chdlkoma ) ; kakkavi, 'kettle' (taUkdbi); 

 ' lead ' ( inolybdos ) ; rtn, 'file' (rine); and half a 

 dozen more. This looked like an insuperable 1 , 

 objection ; for how, unless the Gypsies had adopted 

 the farrier's craft since their arrival in a Greek- 

 speaking country, should their word for 'a horse' 

 l>e Indian, for 'a horseshoe' Greek? But, Batail- 

 lard contends, the converse may be the case, the 

 Greeks may have borrowed their terms from 

 Romani. Certainly, the occurrence of petlol in 

 Welsh (12th century, pedhaul), for 'horseshoe,' 

 looks like more than a mere coincidence ; and 

 tfh'ala, the word for ' tin ' with Asiatic Gypsies, 

 seems to forbid our deriving kuldi from kiiliimn. 

 Anyhow, Bataillard's theory is gaining favour 

 with foreign arclueologists, among whom MM. 

 Mortillet, Chantre, and Burnouf hatl arrived inde- 

 pendently at similar conclusions. 



The counter-theories as to the origin of the 

 Gypsies need not detain us long. There is the 

 Tamerlane theory of Grellmann (1783), according 

 to which the Gypsies first reached Europe in 1417 

 a theory disproved by firmly-established facts. 

 There is the Behram Gur theory of Pott and 

 Bataillard (who since relinquished it), developed 

 in 1844-49, and adopted by Newbold, Sir Henry 

 Rawlinson, De Goeje, Sir Richard Burton, and an 

 Edinburgh Reviewer (July 1878). According to 

 this theory, about 420 A.D., Behram Gur imported 

 12,000 Jat minstrels from India to Persia, and 

 their descendants, gradually wandering westward, 

 entered Europe in 1025 or as late as the beginning 

 of the 14th century. Plausible, and it may le 

 containing a modicum of truth, this theory fails 

 as a whole in view of the marked unlikeness of 

 Jataki, the language of the Jats, and Roman!, the 

 language of the Gypsies. Lastly, attempts have 

 been made, on the ground for the most part of a 

 similar habit of life, to identify the Gypsies with 

 various Indian vagrants e.g. by Richardson with 

 the Nats (1803), by R. Mitra with the Bediyns 

 (1870), and by Leland and Grierson with the Doms 

 (1873-88). Even if successful, such identification 

 would prove little more than that India, like 

 Egypt, has its Gypsy tril>es a fact in itself 

 extremely probable, but so far lacking linguistic 

 corroboration. 



Language. What their religion has been to the 

 Jews, that their language is to the Gypsies a lx>nd 

 of universal brotherhood. For Gypsies everywhere 

 speak the self-same Kumuni chiv ( ' Gypsy tongue ' ). 

 Their words for ' water ' and ' knife are in Persia 

 /nitii, c/ii-ri ( 1823) ; in Siberia, /miiji, tm-luiri ( 1878); 

 in Armenia, pant, churi (1864); in Egypt, jmiti, 

 r/ii'tri (1856); in Norway, /unit, tjnri (1858); in 

 England, pant, churi (1830); in Brazil, JHIHIH, 

 <-li ii riii (1886) where spelling and dates are those 

 of the works whence these words have leen taken. 

 But over and al>ove their identity and there are 

 hundreds more like them in every Gyp-sy dialect 

 they are identical with the Hindustani fxtni and 

 eh n ri, familiar to all Anglo-Indians. To cite but 

 a few more instances, 'nose,' 'hair,' 'eye,' 'ear' 

 are in Turkish Roman! tiak, bal, yak, kunn ,' in 

 Hindustani, nak, bal, ak/i, k<ni ; whilst 'Go, see 

 who knocks at the door ' in the one language is Jd, 

 dik kini I'/ititai'fta o vudar, and in the other JA, d> M 

 kon chaldya dvdr ko. This discovery was not made 



