The Gypsies | Page 5

kumbo-cephalic skulls, and appears to her votaries arrayed,
not in silk attire, but in strange fragments of leather from ancient Irish
graves, or in cloth from Lacustrine villages. She glitters with the quaint

jewelry 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,