The Gypsies | Page 5

of the first Italian race, whose ghosts, if they wail over the "find," "speak in a language man knows no more." She charms us with etchings or scratchings of mammoths on mammoth-bone, and invites us to explore mysterious caves, to picnic among megalithic monuments, and speculate on pictured Scottish stones. In short, she engages man to investigate his ancestry, a pursuit which presents charms even to the illiterate, and asks us to find out facts concerning works of art which have interested everybody in every age.
Ad interim, before the science of curiosities is segregated from that of ethnology, I may observe that one of the marvels in the latter is that, among all the subdivisions of the human race, there are only two which have been, apparently from their beginning, set apart, marked and cosmopolite, ever living among others, and yet reserved unto themselves. These are the Jew and the gypsy. From time whereof history hath naught to the contrary, the Jew was, as he himself holds in simple faith, the first man. Red Earth, Adam, was a Jew, and the old claim to be a peculiar people has been curiously confirmed by the extraordinary genius and influence of the race, and by their boundless wanderings. Go where we may, we find the Jew--has any other wandered so far?
Yes, one. For wherever Jew has gone, there, too, we find the gypsy. The Jew may be more ancient, but even the authentic origin of the Romany is lost in ancient Aryan record, and, strictly speaking, his is a prehistoric caste. Among the hundred and fifty wandering tribes of India and Persia, some of them Turanian, some Aryan, and others mixed, it is of course difficult to identify the exact origin of the European gypsy. One thing we know: that from the tenth to the twelfth century, and probably much later on, India threw out from her northern half a vast multitude of very troublesome indwellers. What with Buddhist, Brahman, and Mohammedan wars,--invaders outlawing invaded,--the number of out-castes became alarmingly great. To these the Jats, who, according to Captain Burton, constituted the main stock of our gypsies, contributed perhaps half their entire nation. Excommunication among the Indian professors of transcendental benevolence meant social death and inconceivable cruelty. Now there are many historical indications that these outcasts, before leaving India, became gypsies, which was the most natural thing in a country where such classes had already existed in very great numbers from early times. And from one of the lowest castes, which still exists in India, and is known as the Dom, {19} the emigrants to the West probably derived their name and several characteristics. The Dom burns the dead, handles corpses, skins beasts, and performs other functions, all of which were appropriated by, and became peculiar to, gypsies in several countries in Europe, notably in Denmark and Holland, for several centuries after their arrival there. The Dom of the present day also sells baskets, and wanders with a tent; he is altogether gypsy. It is remarkable that he, living in a hot climate, drinks ardent spirits to excess, being by no means a "temperate Hindoo," and that even in extreme old age his hair seldom turns white, which is a noted peculiarity among our own gypsies of pure blood. I know and have often seen a gypsy woman, nearly a hundred years old, whose curling hair is black, or hardly perceptibly changed. It is extremely probable that the Dom, mentioned as a caste even in the Shastras, gave the name to the Rom. The Dom calls his wife a Domni, and being a Dom is "Domnipana." In English gypsy, the same words are expressed by Rom, romni, and romnipen. D, be it observed, very often changes to r in its transfer from Hindoo to Romany. Thus doi, "a wooden spoon," becomes in gypsy roi, a term known to every tinker in London. But, while this was probably the origin of the word Rom, there were subsequent reasons for its continuance. Among the Cophts, who were more abundant in Egypt when the first gypsies went there, the word for man is romi, and after leaving Greece and the Levant, or Rum, it would be natural for the wanderers to be called Rumi. But the Dom was in all probability the parent stock of the gypsy race, though the latter received vast accessions from many other sources. I call attention to this, since it has always been held, and sensibly enough, that the mere fact of the gypsies speaking Hindi-Persian, or the oldest type of Urdu, including many Sanskrit terms, does not prove an Indian or Aryan origin, any more than the English spoken by American negroes proves a Saxon descent. But if the Rom can be identified with the Dom--and the circumstantial evidence,