98 GYPSIES. 



any of the supposed relations with India of this prince 

 historical (7th Mon., Chap. XIV, p. 402). 



The Jats were a warlike race until their power was 

 completely and forever broken by the Mohammedan 

 conquerors of India. To this day they inhabit the north- 

 west and form two-fifths the population of the Punjab, 

 and half that of the Rajput states, while they are scat- 

 tered in Baluchistan and Sind. They are a peaceful, agri- 

 cultural, cattle raising people, but the wandering instinct 

 sometimes seizes them and they leave their homes and 

 travel off in the guise of itinerant pedlars into central 

 Asia. These migratory habits are ancient. They wan- 

 dered in the ninth century as far west as Syria, where 

 there was a Jat quarter in Antioch, while for twenty- 

 four years a colony maintained themselves in the Chal- 

 daean marshes, though in 834 the Caliph's troops van- 

 quished them and they were transferred to the Cilician 

 frontier. 



But of all the Indian races Charles G. Leland has 

 shown (Gypsies, p. 331), there is a race preeminently 

 Gypsy, called the Dom. These tribes live in Central 

 India. They are wanderers like the Gypsies, their lan- 

 guage is closely similar, they have no religion to speak 

 of, they make baskets and handle corpses, their women 

 tell fortunes, and they have many other Gypsy charac- 

 teristics. 



When in the tenth century and from that time on wave 

 after wave of Mohammedan and Mongol conquest broke 

 over India, there is reason to believe that many of the 

 dregs of the population, some of whom were outcasts 

 already, who had nothing to lose if nothing to gain, left 

 the country. They probably left gradually, some of 

 them may have wandered away before the conquest 

 began — there were Jat colonies on the Persian gulf before 

 the ninth century and we have seen them at that period 

 in Syria and Cilicia— while some may not have left until 



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