http://www.oocities.org/romani_life_society/indexpics/HistoryOrigins.pdf
Ian Hancock - ON ROMANI ORIGINS AND IDENTITY
The Romani Archives and Documentation Center
The University of Texas at Austin
“A geneticist’s summary of [our] data would describe the Gypsies as a
conglomerate of Asian populations . . . unambiguous proof of the Indian ancestry
of the Gypsies comes from three genetic marker systems . . . found on the same
ancestral chromosomal background in Gypsy, Indian and Pakistani subjects.
While confirming the centuries-old linguistic theory of the Indian origins is no
great triumph for modern genetic research, the major, unexpected and most
significant result of these studies is the strong evidence of the common descent of
all Gypsies regardless of declared group identity, country of residence and rules
of endogamy . . . The Gypsy group was born in Europe. All marker systems
suggest that the earliest splits occurred 20 to 24 generations ago, i.e. from the late
13th century onwards” (Kalaydjieva et al., 2005:1085-6)."
Those of you familiar with my work know that it has taken a circuitous route over the years
in an ongoing effort to refine it, and no doubt it will be modified further as it continues.
Thus in my earliest writing I supported a fifth-century exodus from India and accepted the
established three-way Rom-Dom-Lom split; I no longer do. I argued for a wholly non-“Aryan”
ancestry, but no longer believe this to have been the case nor, indeed, that “Aryan” is even a
genetically relevant label. I saw the migration from India to Anatolia as having been a slow one,
consisting of a succession of military encounters with different non-Indian populations; I no
longer think that it happened in that way. I have argued, sometimes strenuously, that our people
were one when they left India, one when they arrived in Anatolia, and one when they entered
Europe. My findings are leading me more and more to believe that they were not.
Working especially closely with three other scholars, themselves also Romanies—
Kenneth Lee at Newcastle University, Ronald Lee at the University of Toronto and Adrian
Marsh at Greenwich University—I have come to modify these positions considerably. The
ongoing research of Marcel Courthiade and Jan Kochanowski in France has also been most
useful in reaching these newer interpretations1
, and I am especially grateful to Vardan Voskanian
for generously sharing his materials and his ideas regarding Lomavren. Though this newer
perspective differs considerably from my earlier one, I find myself obliged to accept it because I
am wholly convinced that the history that is coming to light is, in its broad form, the correct
history.
That the Romani people had a military origin is not in fact a new hypothesis; it was first
adressed over a century ago by Burton, Leland, de Goeje, Clarke and others. My own
contribution, besides attempting to flesh out the details, addresses rather the origins of the
Romani language as a military koVnJ (Hancock, 2000). Certainly not everyone is persuaded by
the direction my work is taking; Matras says :
"In a number of recent publications, Hancock claims that Romani was formed as a military koïné
by a caste of warriors assembled to resist the Islamic invasions of India. In some circles, this view
is gaining popularity as it pretends to revise what is referred to as potentially racist, or at least
stereotypical images of the Rom. There is, however, neither linguistic nor historical evidence to
support it (2004a:301; see also 2004c for a harsher criticism2
). "
Matras’ own position—though itself accompanied by neither “linguistic nor historical
evidence to support it”—adheres to the traditional account:
"Indic diaspora languages [are] spoken by what appear to be descendants of itinerant castes of
artisans and entertainers who are spread throughout Central Asia, the Near East and Europe. They
include . . . Romani (1999:1)
Proto-Romani was carried from India westwards by migrants who appear to have been members
of service-providing castes, similar in status and occupational profile to jatis or service groups
known in some parts of India as dom . . . the řom settled in the Byzantine Empire some time
around the tenth century CE (2004b:278). "
More recently, Tcherenkov & Laederich (2004:13) have leant toward the same traditional
origin:
"[It] is but a small step to support the hypothesis that these Indian Dom are the ancestors of the
European Rroma. The professions exercised by the Dom in the Indian subcontinent—musicians,
dancers, smiths, basket weavers, sieve makers, even woodworkers, are transmited from father to
son. From their similarity to the ones of the European Rroma these could or may be considered as
the origins of the traditional Rroma trades! . . . some authors claim that Rroma originated from
either one of the upper castes such as the Rajputs or from a mix of different castes. With our
current knowledge, this cannot be settled to satisfaction."
The present monograph raises a number of questions, some of which are posed at 12,
below. A central position underlying the discussion is that three salient, and hitherto not
adequately considered, aspects of the contemporary Romani condition rest upon the facts of our
history detailed here:
First that the population has been a composite one from its very beginning, and
at that time was occupationally rather than ethnically-defined;
Second that while their earliest components are traceable to India, Romanies
essentially constitute a population that acquired its identity and language in the
West (accepting the Christian, Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire as being
linguistically and culturally ‘western’), and
Third that the entry into Europe from Anatolia was not as a single people, but as
a number of at least three smaller migrations over perhaps as much as a twocentury
span of time.
Together, these account in part for the lack of cohesiveness among the various groups selfidentifying
as Romani, and for the major dialect splits within the language. We might see each
major post-Byzantine group as evolving in its own way, continuing independently a process of
assimilation and adaptation begun in northwestern India. Thus the descendants of those who
were held in slavery until the 19th century, and those whose ancestors entered Spain in the 15th
century are today very different, the former—the Vlax Romanies—having been heavily
influenced genetically, culturally and linguistically by Romanian and the Romanians; the latter
on the other hand—the Kalé Romanies—having been influenced in the same way by Mozarabic
and Spanish, and both populations have furthermore been separated by a more than six century
span of time. Thus any originally acquired characteristics they might still share, which constitute
the genetic, linguistic and cultural so-called “core of direct retention,” are greatly outweighed by
characteristics accreted from the non-Romani world. The reunification (or more accurately
unification) movement urged by such organizations as the International Romani Union or the
Roma National Congress seeks—as I do myself—to emphasize the original, shared features of
each group rather than those acquired from outside which separate them; yet for some, that
original material is now scant, and creating for them any sense of a pan-Romani, global ethnicity
would require the kind of effort that is, sadly, very far down on the list of day-to-day priorities
and, pragmatically, would be difficult to instigate. It also calls into question the legitimacy of
the exclusionary and subjective position taken by some groups who regard themselves as being
“more Romani” than others.3
1. Who Were the Ancestors of the Romanies?
Using lexical data I demonstrated (Hancock, 1995) that the assumed early single migration out of
India with a subsequent split into Domari, Lomavren and Romani (i.e. Middle Eastern, Armenian
and European Gypsy) once it had passed through the Persian language territories, could not be
maintained in light of the percentages of shared and non-shared Iranic items evident in each
today. This confirmation is already finding a place in the new scholarship; thus Windfuhr, in his
entry on Gypsy languages in the Encyclopædia Iranica (2000:415) refers to that 1995 study
when stating that the Iranic items “reflect three distinct historical layers of Indo-Aryan
innovations, which suggests three successive westward migrations, rather than a single one.” It
is of some significance since it overturns the generally accepted historical scenario current over
the past one and a half centuries, and impacts directly on our understanding of early Romani.
Higgie (1984) for instance, attempted a reconstruction of Proto-Romani by comparing Romani
with Domari, as did Kaufman (1984); Higgie’s work points to something like the 6th century BC
as the time of the split from Indic, while Kaufman posits the separation from Indo-Aryan by 300-
400 BC. This would be comparable to attempting a reconstruction of the original Latin by
including (say) Umbrian or Oscan along with the modern Romance languages in the comparative
data.
An examination of the earliest words in the Romani language suggests a number of
things: firstly that there is little in the original, ‘first layer’ Indian vocabulary that reflects a
nomadic or itinerant population, but rather it points to a settled one; and secondly that while
there are not many original words for e.g. artisan or agricultural skills, there are quite a few
military terms. There are Indian words for soldier and attack but not for farmer or harvest; there
are words for sword and spear but not for plough or hoe; there is a word for horse but not for
buffalo and so on4
. Given these lexical clues and the likely time period (both discussed below),
and given that the Indian words and grammar in modern Romani point to the languages spoken
in the north-western part of India and to nowhere else, an examination of Indian history for
evidence of any military activity during that time and in that area is a natural next step—but first,
the time period must be established.
2. The Date of Departure
It has been claimed repeatedly that the speakers of the language that developed into modern
Romani left India some time between the fifth and ninth centuries; those who support the
traditional Shah Nameh explanation, which is routinely repeated in even the latest books on
Romanies, would place it in the 5th century. Others, like myself, see military activity as the
reason for leaving, but still argue for an earlier date of departure: “they left perhaps as early as in
the sixth century A.D., probably due to repeated incursions by Islamic warriors”5
(Barany,
2002:9)
On the basis of lexicon, Kaufman (1984:12) has asserted that:
There is no way that Romani could have avoided Arabic loanwords unless it had entered Iran
before 700 AD. Speculations that do not operate within these constraints as axiomatic are idle; it is
totally irrelevant that there may be some historical evidence of troubles in, and outmigrations
from, India around 1000 AD, and I am getting bored with hearing again and again the speculation
that the Gypsies may have left India at such a late date.
Vekerdi (1988:13) says : The Gypsies’ ancestors began leaving northwest India probably about the seventh
century AD. They are characterized as robbers, murderers, hangmen and entertainers.
These professions were prescribed for them by the rules of the Hindu caste system. Thus
they belonged to the so-called ‘wandering criminal tribes’ of India and were obliged to lead a
parasitic way of life. Among the numerous outcast groups, they occupied the lowest rung on
the social scale.
Halwachs (2000: 5, 24): is also persuaded that the lack of adoptions from Arabic is a
decisive factor in dating the time of departure:
As Romani lacks Arabic loans, it is to be assumed that the Romani speakers left the Persian area
before its arabization . . . and following this moved on to the Byzanthinian area of influence . . .
Experts still disagree on the point of time of the Gypsies’ emigration from the north-west of India.
If we consider all the different statements, the resulting period of time is somewhere between the
5th and 10th centuries after Christ. In the second half of the first millennium, emigration most
probably did not happen all at once but took place in the course of various waves.
In an earlier monograph (1977: 3), Kenrick too believed that
[t]he Romanies of Europe must have come through Iran before 600 ADC—the first Arab
invasions—this is the only possible explanation for the large number of Iranian words and the
small (infinitesimal) number of Arabic words found in the Romani vocabulary,
though in a more recent statement (Patrin, 14:viij:00) he moves that estimation two or three
centuries forward:
My basic theory at the moment is that the Roma of Europe are mainly offspring of the defeated
Zotts of Zottistan [in AD 855]. These were divided by the Arabs into two groups; one was sent to
Ain-Zarba where they were in due course massacred by the Byzantine Greeks—maybe the women
taken as slaves. The other group went to Khaneikin and thence to Europe. They were mainly
buffalo keepers (see Rishi’s article “Panjabi love of buffalo milk” [1976]) but obviously in
Zottistan had developed other trades. We know there were musicians there. Some other Indians
joined them and adopted Romani as their language, intermarried, &c.
More recently (2004:10) he presents a social origin but (wisely?) avoids speculating as to
dates:
My own belief, as stated earlier, is that Indian immigrants from various tribes intermarried and
intermixed in Persia, forming into a people there using the name Dom, and that a large number of
them then moved into Europe; their descendants are the Romany Gypsies of today.
In his UNESCO-sponsored book, Alain Reyniers (1998:25) writes of
. . . Une sortie étalée le Ve et le XIIe siècle . . . Après une première étape en Perse, les Tsiganes se
seraient divisés en deux groupes. Le premier se serait dirigé vers le Moyen-Orient et l’Egypte. Le
second se serait déplacé vers le nord-ouest.
Another recent publication (Marushiakova & Popov, 2000:5) supports the traditional
view, and places the presence of Romanies in Persia before AD 900: According to most linguists, the formation of the Gypsy language began sometime in the 6th or 7th
century, while from the 8th-9th centuries onwards, it developed as a separate language under the
influence of the majority languages spoken in the area: Persian, Armenian, Greek. Wandering for
several centuries throughout the lands of what are today Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, and to the
south of the Caspian Sea, the Gypsies (and their language) divided into two separate branches,
speaking the so-called “ben” and “phen” dialects respectively, this being an important stage in the
development of the Gypsy language and the Gypsy community as a whole. Reaching the land of
northern Mesopotamia and the eastern boundary of the Byzantine Empire towards the end of the
10th and beginning of the 11th centuries, the Gypsies split into three major migration groups—the
ben-speaking Dom, who took the southern route, or stayed in the Middle East, and the phenspeaking
groups of Lom, who took the northern route, and Rom, who took the western route.
Achim (2004:7-12) also accepts a ninth-century departure:
The migration took place over an extended period of time and was not dramatic in nature . . . [i]t is
generally accepted that the migration of Gypsies from India to Europe took place between the
ninth and the fourteenth centuries, in a number of waves. It is believed that the Gypsies arrived in
Persia in the ninth century. Persian sources call them Luli or Luri.
Blachut (2005:26), using Barany (2002) as his source, says
Gypsies had begun leaving the southern part of India in 1500 BC, when the Aryans invaded the
country . . . Gypsies originated in the Punjab region of northwestern India. They began leaving in
the sixth century AD because of constant invasions by Islamic warriors.
Wogg (2006:3), basing his position on the combined works of Hübschmannová (2004),
Kenrick (2004) and Matras (2002) says: The [Shah Nameh] legend about the Luri could thus very well refer to the Roma, who left Persia
already in the 5th century, and India even earlier on their westward journey . . . most scientists
today assume it was over a long period of time—between the 3rd and 10th century—during which
the Roma left India, most likely between the 8th and 10th century
In discussing Romani history, Price (2000:207) says “[a]t some indeterminate period, not later
than the ninth century AD, the Romanies were on the move again [out of India].” Miklosich
(1874) put the date of departure at somewhere between AD 500 and AD 700, while Sampson
(1923:157) argued for the ninth century. Fonseca (1996:94) provides an account that concludes
“the earliest Gypsies would have left India at least by 720 AD.” A recent interpretation has
Romanies leaving India between AD 1017-1030 as a result of Ghaznavid invasions, but splitting
into the three-way Dom-Rom-Lom (Jordan, Europe, Armenia) division somewhere between
Afghanistan and Persia (Knudsen, 2003:22-23), while Tcherenkov & Laederich (2004:14), who
also support the one-migration three-way-split position, have most recently placed the migration
back six hundred years: “[A] time frame for the migrations of Rroma from the Indian
subcontinent . . . at what we believe is a reasonable departure date, around the fourth and fifth
centuries.”
Djurić (2003), on having determined that Romani has a middle voice, has argued that the
language must date back to before the time of Christ. Any claim to a pre-AD 1000 date of
departure, however, must be challenged on the basis of the historical development of the IndoAryan
languages. Woolner’s (1916:123) analysis of the derivation of the first-person singular
personal subject pronoun me, and Bloch’s (1953:24) similar examination of kon “who” both point to a post 7th century development. We must also examine the reassignation of neutergender
nouns after that category began to disappear from the Apabhramśas by the end of the
Middle Indic period. This is accepted as about the year AD 1000; Masica (1991:8) gives the
New Indo Aryan period as “1000 AD - present . . . the modern Indo-Aryan languages properly
and henceforth called New Indo Aryan . . . date from approximately AD 1000.” The transition
was clear-cut, and the date significant. Bloch (1965:29) says “it is of great importance to
indicate the chronological break, which isolates the whole of neo-Indian [from Middle Indic].”
“The three genders [of Old Indic] continue [in Middle Indic] but the masculine and the neuter
come closer together” (Sen, 1960:75). The OIA neuter gender was systematically lost, the
change spreading towards the northwestern part of India, where some three-gender NIA
languages are still found to this day, e.g. numbers of Central ( auraseni) languages, such as
Bhili, Gujarati and Khandeshi as well as some Southern (Maharasthri) languages such as
Marathi. Nevertheless.
. . . the most widespread NIA system is a two-gender system, in which the old masculine and
neuter have merged. (That is not to say that there have not been some reassignments of OIA
gender . . . e.g. the NIA descendants of OIA agni- ‘fire,’ which is masculine, are mostly
feminine”), as is Romani jag, as well (Masica, 1991:221).
According to Burton (1851:90-91), the neat shift of the neuter to the masculine set did not
happen everywhere: “In the Játaki dialect, nouns are of two genders, masculine and feminine.
The neuter is not used, and words which properly speaking belong to that gender are made
masculine and feminine, as usage directs without any fixed rule.” He describes Jataki, the
language of the Jats, as “a corrupt form of the Multání, itself a corruption of the Panjábī,
tongue.”
It is significant that the languages most like Romani—Hindi, Panjabi, Rajasthani, &c., are
not three-gender languages. If pre-Romani had left India before the end of the first millennium
AD, which is to say during the MIA period, it would have retained its three-genders, and the fact
that it is a two-gender language today would oblige us to accept that the loss of the neuter, and its
reassignation to either masculine or feminine, took place outside of India. Kenrick is of this
opinion, believing Persian to have been the factor of change: Il y avait trois genres (comme en allemand), au moment où les Tsiganes ont quitté l’Inde, mais le
neutre a disparu au Moyen-Orient, sans doute sous l’influence du parsi (1994:54).
He maintains this position in (Kenrick, 2004:104): “There were three genders (like
German) when the speakers left India, but the neuter disappearted in the Middle East, probably
under the influence of Persian.” Out of contact with other Indian languages, such reassignation
would have been random; however, comparing those Romani nouns deriving from neuter
sourceforms in Sanskrit and/or Prakrit, with their equivalents in Hindi, we find that the match is
98.7% (one mismatch out of 35 items compared) for the masculine set, and 60% for the feminine
set, 86% for both masculine and feminine matches. The approximately 2:1 ratio of masculine to
feminine Indian-derived nouns in Romani also accords with the reassignation of OIA neuters
mainly to the masculine set. While he did not discuss the date of the presence of pre-Romani in
India or recognize its relevance to ascertaining the time of its separation, Lesný had already
noted the reassignation of OIA neuters in MIA nearly a century ago: Die mittelindischen lautlichen Prozesse haben bekanntlich bewirkt, dass auch das Geschlecht eine
Änderung erfahren hat. Marati und Gujarati haben noch die ursprüngliche Einteilung in drei
Geschlechter behalten, Bangali unterscheidet eigentlich kein Geschlecht, Hindi, Panjabi, Bangali,
Sindhi, Kashmiri und Naipali unterscheiden nur nur das männliche und das weibliche Geschlecht.
Diese nordwestlischen Gruppe reiht sich auch die Zigeunersprache an, indem sie
auffallenderweise in bezug auf die Änderung des Geschlechtes mit derselben überinstimmt. Ich
will die zahlreichen Neutra, die zu Maskulinen geworden sind, übergehen und erwähne nur zwei
Substantiva, die sowohl in der genannten Sprachengruppe als auch in den Zigeunermundarten
Feminina geworden sind: agni masc. ‘Feuer’, MIA aggi, Marati, Gujarati, Hindi ag f., Panjabi
agg, f., Sindhi agi, f., Kashmiri agun, m., Romani jag, f. aksi ‘Auge’, MIA acchi, n. oder f.,
Marati aksi n., Gujarati ankh f., Hindi ank f., Panjabi akkh f., Sindhi akhi f., Kashmiri acchi f.,
Romani jakh f. (1915-1916:422).
Since the loss of the neuter gender had begun to take place while the NIA dialect groups
were still in formation, this means that pre-Romani was still in India at the time that this was
taking place, i.e. still a part of the Middle Indo-Aryan cluster. Even if pre-Romani were derived
from various Indian languages, as I maintain, the case still holds; a gender match with Sindhi or
Panjabi yields the same result.
If we assume that Sampson’s (and my own earlier) “single race speaking a single
language” remained intact until it had passed through Persia, then we would expect the Persian
words it picked up during that period to be shared by Romani, Domari and Lomavren; but they
are surprisingly few: just 16% between Romani and Domari, 7% between Romani and
Lomavren, and 12% between Lomavren and Domari. By way of comparison, on the other hand,
over 50% of the Persian words in Romani are shared by Urdu: .....
...
4. Domari
That Romani, Domari and Lomavren constitute three branches of an original proto-language has
remained the conventional wisdom in Romani historical linguistic studies for over a century, and
continues to be repeated. That they had independent origins had already been suspected by
Colocci (1907:279), who urged caution in drawing too sweeping a conclusion from the available
sources:
To imagine that just because the Gypsies of Europe and their brothers in Asia share a common
linguistic core, one should therefore conclude that there was a single exodus of these people [out
of India], and furthermore that the unity of their language argues against more than one migration,
13
seems to be a conclusion which is only slightly weakened by the still nebulous state of the
documentation. Unity of language might well prove unity of origin; but there could still have been
different migrations, chronologically and geographically, without that fact being too apparent from
the lexical adoptions acquired by the mother tongue in the countries through which they passed;
all the moreso since those migrations were very rapid. To conclude, therefore, that the unity of
their exodus rests upon the recognition of the unity of the substrate of their language, strikes me as
a proposition which shouldn’t be universally accepted without [first incorporating] the benefit of a
[lexical] inventory.
The late Angus Fraser also cautioned (1992:39) that
despite Sampson’s insistence that both sprang from a single source, some of Domari’s
dissimilarities from European Romani create doubts about how far we can assume that the parent
community was uniform.
In Hancock (1995) I demonstrated that Colocci’s and Fraser’s doubts were justified, and the fact
that Domari and Romani had separate origins is gradually moving toward general acceptance;
Matras concludes, in the most recent overview of Domari, that together with Romani they “were,
to begin with, two distinct, albeit related Indo-Aryan idioms” (1999:55).
The additional claim I make that the Domari language and its speakers left India earlier
than did Romani and its speakers, might also be supported by the evidence of gender. Macalister
(1914:9,11) says : [t]here are three genders [in Domari], masculine, feminine, and neuter. The last is now all but
obsolete, but recognisable only by the form of the accusative singular . . . As in most Aryan
languages, neuter substantives have no accusative form different from the nominative. This is
now the only criterion for distinguishing neuter nouns. But even here they appear to be in process
of assimilation to the masculine or feminine declension, and developing analogous accusative
forms.
Sampson (1926:125) has contested this, though it has to be assumed that he is only querying
Macalister’s claim that the modern Domari language has three genders; he would have known
that three genders existed in the speech of the original population, which he maintains left India
“at least as early as the end of the ninth century” (Sampson, 1926:28-29). He says “the Nuri
‘neuter’ of Macalister has no historical basis, and is to be understood merely as a term applied by
this collector to nouns denoting inanimate objects in which, as in Eur. Gyp., the form of the acc.
sg. is identical with that of the nominative.” Unfortunately, Macalister does not provide genders
in his Domari vocabulary, though he lists some examples of each in his grammatical outline (pp.
15-16): béli, záro, “friend”, “boy,” m., cóni, júri, “girl,” “woman,”f., páni, ag, “water,” “fire,” n.
Kenrick, however, in his current series of Domari lessons (2000:2), says “some dialects also
have a traditional (historical) neuter gender, ending in a consonant.”
Besides losing the neuter gender, Indo-Aryan also lost the dual number that characterized
its Old period. Romani lacks this entirely, but according to Macalister (op. cit., p. 9), in Domari
“faint traces are not wanting of the former existence of a dual, but this is almost wholly
obsolete.” It is a pity that Macalister did not provide actual examples of these, since if they had
indeed existed in Domari, it would suggest an improbably much earlier separation from India;
thus Masica (1991:226) says “[t]here are only two numbers, singular and plural, in NIA at best.
OIA had three, but the old dual quietly disappeared at the beginning of MIA,” but he has MIA
beginning around 600 BC (op. cit., p. 51)—far too early to match with the rest of the linguistic data we have on Domari. If Domari does indeed show evidence of a dual number, this is
probably influence from Arabic, which has it (and not Persian or Kurdish, which don’t).
5. Lomavren
On the basis of its lexicon Lomavren, the language of the Lom or “Bosha” in eastern Turkey and
the Caucasus would seem to stand somewhere between the two migrations that gave rise to
Domari and Romani. On the one hand it shares items with Romani which differ from their
Domari equivalents, thus and on the other, it shares items with Domari which are absent (or which have not been replaced)
in Romani: .......
The complete lack of Greek lexical items in Lomavren shows that the ancestors of the
Lom never made it into Anatolia, or else that they passed through it before Greek was
established there. It furthermore shares only five items from Persian with Romani (Some
nineteen have been identified in Lomavren altogether (Voskanian, 2002), and over 100 in
Romani—Hancock 1995). Significantly, not one such item in either language is from the Middle
Persian (Pahlavi) period; all are from the modern period, which dates from the early 10th century,
thus further undermining the argument for a 5th century passage through the area. Furthermore,
there is only one indisputable item of Kurdish origin in Lomavren (cf. perhaps ten in Romani).
Fraser (0000:14) has already noted that Lomavren and Romani share practically none of
the same Armenian loanwords. Those Armenian-derived items in Romani for which both
languages have words are as follows:
.......
Another feature that distinguishes Lomavren is that in that language, New Indo-Aryan /a/
was not raised to /e/ as it was in Romani: (LOM khar, par-, phan-, saj, thar-, ROM kher, per-,
phen-, šel, ther- “house”, “fall”, “say”, “hundred,” “have”, cf. Hindi ghar, par-, bhan-, sau,
dhar-); however numeral “ten,” which is las in Lomavren (cf. Hindi das, Romani deš), has the eform
de(s) in its combinations: de’-hu-dui “twelve,” cf. Romani deš-u-duj). A further indication
of its later date of separation from India is in the behaviour of initial Middle Indo-Aryan /v/,
which became /b/ in New Indo-Aryan (including Romani) but not in Lomavren or in Domari:.........
Nevertheless, some Lomavren items appear not to have undergone this: banth-, bakhot-, “shut”,
“break”, cf. Romani phand-, phag-, Domari ben-, bFg-. It is intriguing that both Romani and
Lomavren share the secondary meaning of the verb “sit” to mean “reside”, not paralleled in the
modern languages of India (see '10, below), and that the early speakers of both languages
relexified the original Indian tru ula “trident” (presumably in its religious context as the one
held by the god Shiva) into new religious contexts: Romani tru ul “cross” and Lomavren tcrusul
“church”.6
It is also the case that the Romani word xulaj “host” (from Persian xudāy, and not, as
Voskanian (2002:182) has convincingly shown, from Kurdish xola ‘god’) exhibits the same
phonetic rule that is general in Lomavren, i.e. the shift of /d/ to /l/ (cf. LOM xula, do., and the
items level, lei, las above), suggesting a common point of separation—though it is the only
Romani item that does this; the possibility exists that the word may have entered each language
independently from separate sources. Since /r/ does not go to /l/ in Lomavren, it can be argued
too that lom is from *dom(ba) rather than from Rrom or Rum.
If my argument is maintained that Romani only crystallized into an ethnic mother tongue
under the influence of Byzantine Greek and that prior to that it was a military koïné and not a
native language, then we might suppose that this nativization did not happen to pre-Lomavren
but rather that its speakers were quickly assimilated into the eastern Armenian speech
community, retaining Indian words solely as lexical items conforming to Armenian
morphosyntax and phonology. Though the processes giving rise to each may or may not differ,
this has resulted in an ethnolect similar in many ways to the Angloromani dialect of the British
Romanichals (Hancock, 1984).
The present work is supported by Courthiade’s independent research in France which
even more specifically places the origin of Romani in Kannauj which, together with Ayodha
further east, was the city in the central area which served as the home for the Rajput armies. A
comparison of modern Kannauji with Romani shows less similarity between the two than that
shared by Romani and Hindi; the same is true for Sindhi, the language of Sindh—the place of
origin proposed by Marsh (2003), Marwari, proposed by Hübschmannová (2004), and Jataki
(Jatki, Siraiki), the language of the Jats, a people proposed by Leland (1882) as the ancestors of
the Romanies. While the Rajput conscriptees and their camp followers may well have spoken
these and many other languages, the fact that Romani is nevertheless closer to Hindi/Urdu supports the shared origin these latter languages have in Rajputic. Domari equivalents have been
included by way of comparison.
7. The Military Factor
A military origin for Romanies, generally as captives, is not a new idea; de Goeje (1876: 32)
wrote that “in the year 1000, we find bands of Zotts in the army of Abû-Naçr ibn-Bakhtiyâr, in
Persia and Kirmân (Ibno-’l-Athîr, ix., p. 114). In 1025, al-Mançûra was conquered by Mahmûd
al-Gaznawî, because the prince of this town had forsaken Islamism;” Clarke (1878: 134) wrote
that “it was from the Ghaznevide conqueror and at home that the independence of the Jats
received its death-blow. The victorious army of Mahmoud, when returning laden with spoil from
the Somnauth expedition of 1025, was attacked and pillaged by them on the banks of the Indus.
Their temerity was chastised with exemplary rigour. Broken and dispersed by the resistless arms
of the Sultan of Ghazni, they were not, however, annihilated.” Leland, (1882: 24) that “Jat
warriors were supplemented by other tribes . . . they were broken and dispersed in the eleventh
century by Mahmoud” and Burton (1898: 212) that “Sultan Mahmoud carried with him in A.D.
1011 some two hundred thousand [Indian] captives, the spoils of his expedition.” Kochanowski
later agreed (1968: 27-28) that “our own inter-disciplinary studies have shown that the Gypsies
are Rajputs who left northern India,” and Vijender Bhalla’s serological studies undertaken in
India concluded that “Rajputs occupy the [genetic] position nearest the Gypsies” (1992: 331-
332). Over a decade ago the Polish scholar Lech Mróz had also considered a specific connection
with the Islamic raids into India: “Podsumowują: uwaŜam za prawdopodobne Ŝe Cyganów
dostali się do Iranu w czasach Mahmuda z Ghazny, w resultacie jego wypraw do Indii”
(1992:40; “I consider it likely that the Gypsies’ ancestors arrived in Iran in the time of Mahmud
of Ghazni, as a result of his raids into India”). Bajram Haliti (2006:6) has come to the same
conclusion: “Some time between the tenth and eleventh centuries, the largest groups of Roma
left India and the main cause was invasion of the great emperor Mahmud Gazni, who led 17 raids
in western India. Running away from terror, Roma first stopped in Iran, and then separated in
two groups, the first moving toward Spain, and the second toward Byzantium and Greece.”
Nevertheless there continues to be resistance to this; in 2004 in his own interpretation of Romani
history Viorel Achim (loc. cit.) wrote “The distinguishing feature of the Gypsy migration is that
it was not of a military nature.” An examination of the circumstances of Indian and Middle
Eastern politics and warfare during the relevant timeframe is thus called for.
For roughly the first quarter century of the second millennium, north-western India came
under a series of attacks by Muslim troops led by General Mahmud from his headquarters at
Ghazna (today called Ghazni and located in Afghanistan). Between AD 1001 and AD 1026
these Ghaznavids, as they were called, made seventeen forays into the Hindu-Shahi kingdom as
far as Kashmir with the intent to spread Islam; ultimately the Indian kingdoms of Nagarkot,
Thanesar, Kannauj and Kalinjar were all conquered and left in the hands of Hindu vassals. There
were seventeen battles altogether; the main ones during the Shahiya Dynasty being
..........
They were successful; with only a couple of exceptions the Ghaznavids were able to win
each confrontation with the Indian armies, sometimes taking many hundreds of prisoners, as in
the encounters at Kabul and Peshawar.
In addition to being prisoners of war, Indians themselves also fought in ghulams or
special units with the Ghaznavids as mawālī, i.e. ‘client’ soldiers. Following Bosworth, Patricia
25
Crone (2003) describes the special Qiqaniyya regiments, Hindu Indians in ethnic units fighting
as Ghazis in the armies of Islam from the earliest periods. Indeed, Indians would not have
reached Trans-Oxiana (on the plain of Dandanqan near Marv) had it not been that they were also
a major and important part of the Ghaznavid army and palace guard. If Mahmud’s son and
successor Mas‘ud had not been sidetracked by the Oghuz Türkmen, he would not have lost the
western empire, and the beginnings of Romani history would have stopped there.
Ghulams were highly trained slave-soldiers, mostly Indian in origin, but including
Khurasanis and others. The Ghaznavid army included an elite palace guard, consisting of
from four to six thousand ghulam heavy cavalry. The balance of the standing army was also
comprised of ghulams, bringing the core force to an estimated 30,000 people. The cavalry were
armed with bows, maces, battleaxes, lances and long curved swords, though their horses went
unarmored (Haider, Nicolle).
Wink (1991:23) describes the “large numbers of Indian captives [who . . .] under the
Ghaznavids did become important.”
That they were used to fight for the Ghaznavids is
documented by Ikram (1989:31) as well, who writes of the “Hindu contingent” of the army of
Mahmud’s son Mas‘ud “fail[ing] conspicuously against the Seljuqs” during the 1038
confrontation (see also Reynolds (1858), Pipes (1981) and (2000), Bosworth (1961), Crone
(1980) and Haider (1990) for descriptions of medieval Muslim armies, and Lal (1994), Levi
(2002a/b) for soldiery in India). It is to those Hindus, both captives and militia, that we must look
for the ancestors of the Romanies.
Those Indian military detachments were made up of the fighters and their camp
followers, the iviranugama, people recruited to tend to the duties associated with war. They
generally outnumbered the soldiers themselves, and like the soldiers came from many different
backgrounds and spoke many different languages and dialects. That Romanies have a mixed
Indian origin is not a new idea; over a century ago de Goeje (1876) wrote of the ancestors’
consisting in large part of the tribe of Jats, which occupied lands in the Indus Valley near Multan
. . . during the Omayad Dynasty they took a great number of their families, together with their
camp followers, into the regions of the Lower Tigris . . . organizing a resistance to al-Motacim’s
government they were subdued and taken to Baghdad, and then taken to various places along the
borders of the Byzantine Empire . . . it is from these Jats that the European Gypsies originate,
This would have placed the date of departure at ca. AD 855. Although the Jat language, Jataki,
is considerably less like Romani than is Hindi-Urdu—see Burton (1849)—a mixed (principally
Jat) origin was also supported by Leland over a century ago, who wrote (op. cit. 332-333) that
Romanies
speak an Aryan tongue, which agrees in the main with that of the Jats, but which contains words
gathered from other Indian sources. This is a consideration of the utmost importance, as by it
alone can we determine what was the agglomeration of tribes in India which formed the western
Gypsy.
Woolner (1914:123-126) has also referred to Mahmud of Ghazni’s forays, leading, he
said, to the “wiping out” of the Indian dialects of Ghandāra (now northwestern Pakistan and
eastern Afghanistan) and the destruction of the Jats.
The soldiers themselves, whatever their social backgrounds, were given honorary
warrior, or kshattriya, caste status and were called Rajputs, or “sons of princes.”
The
administrative language of both the government and the military in the Hindu Shahi kingdom
during that period was medieval Persian, though the local population spoke different Indian and Dardic languages natively; it is already widely accepted that such a situation gave rise to the
Urdu language as a military lingua franca, combining elements from Persian and a number of
different Indian languages. Bailey (1938:1), critically discussed at length by Faruqi (2001:45-
62) writes that “Urdu was born in 1027; its birthplace was Lahore, its parent Old Panjabi; Old
Kha#ї was its step-parent.” Its very name Urdu in fact means “battlefield,” although the word
did not appear in print until the late 1700s, and we can speculate that Romani began to emerge
under the same circumstances; for want of a name I have called this hypothesized contact
language Rajputic elsewhere (Hancock, 2000). As demonstrated above, it shares over three
times as many of the same Persian words with Urdu as it does with Domari. Military terms (or
terms with a military application) of Indic and Persian origin in Romani, and which have thus
been a part of the language from the very beginning, include: “arrow” (sulica) < Skt śūla, Hi sūl, - + Gk –ιτζα (Balkan dialects use the Turkish derived okja for this).
“axe” (tover) < cf. Hindi and Persian tabar “axe,” and Hi tarvar “sword,” Kurdish taver
“battle” (kurripen) < Skt ku- + -tvana
“confront, oppose” (nikl-) < Skt nik layati, Hi nik ln~
“conqueror” (idjavno) < Skt -nayati + karoti-
“decamp; move out” (rad-) < Skt rah- + dad ti
“defeat in battle” (vidjav-) cf. Hi vijit, vijetā
“fight” (kurr-) < Skt kuayati, Hi k n~
“gaiters” (patava) < Skt patta-, Hi pa, cf. E. “puttees”
“horse” (khuro) < Skt ghoa-, Hi gho~
“military” (lurdikano) < Skt l ati +
“plunder” (lur-) < Skt l ati, Hi l n , cf. E. “loot,” “Luri”
“set up camp” (lod-) < Skt lagyati
Aslaughter” (manušvari) < Skt m nuam rik~
“soldier” (kuripaskero) < Skt kuayati + -tvana + kro
“soldier” (lur, lurdo) < Skt l ati, Hi l n~
“spear, lance” (bust) < Skt v cika-, bhr ti-
“spear, stab” (pošav-) < Skt spar ay , Hi phasn~
“sword” (xanrro) < Skt khaaka-, Hi khã:~
“trident” (trušul, but now meaning “cross”) < Skt triÑãla-
“whip” ( upni, ukni) < Skt uknuti
“battleaxe” (ni ako) < Persian na ak, cf. also Kurdish nijakh
“halter” (ašvar) < Persian abz r
“spur” (buzex) < Persian sbux
“saddle” (zen) < Persian zin
“stirrup” (bakali) has no located etymology.
Given the comparatively small number of Indic items in Romani it is significant that there are
two words in the language for silk, viz. phanrr (cf. Panjabi patt “silk,” from the same root as
27 patavo “gaiter,” and kež (cf. Kashmiri kheš) “silken cloth,” but also Urdu (
silk”). The military distinguished between two kinds of silk: that with a fine weave for outer
clothing, and another with a coarse weave worn as an undershirt, and designed specifically to
entangle and impede arrow-heads fired into the body (information courtesy of Adrian Marsh).
One connection with the Ghaznavids is found in the word for a mattock (a tool with a
head consisting of an axe-blade on one side and a hammer on the other), one of the symbols of
authority carried by the Rrom baro. This is nižako in the Vlax dialects and njako in Balkan
Romani. According to Nicolle (1996:153) . . . as usual there was considerable variety among the troops of the eastern Muslim countries,
ranging from the Ghaznavids’ elite heavy cavalry armed with nachakh (axes) to the Turkish horsearchers
of 13th century northern India
The word is Iranic (cf. Gurani Kurdish ni āk “axe”, Mokri, 1951:134), and has passed into the
Perso-Arabic military lexicon as nachakh (Nicolle, op. cit., 306). Various Romani populations in
Europe and America also maintain nacijange semnura or group symbols, such as the sun
(representing e.g. the Serbian Romanies) and the moon (representing the Lovara), which may be
found drawn or carved onto the stago or ‘standard’ at a wedding, and on the sèmno or rupuni
rovli (‘silver baton’), i.e. the clan leader’s staff, and which are appealed to at the consecration of
the mulengi sinìja or ‘table of the dead’ at a pomàna (plural pomèni) or wake. Here, the
invocation is “Khama, hona thaj Devla, ašun(en) man!” which means “Sun, Moon and God,
hear me”. The significance here is the fact that the Sun and the Moon were the two symbols
worn emblematically on the armour and tunics of the Rajput warriors to identify them in battle
from all others. The Rajputs’ religious restriction on eating vegetables that grow below ground at
a funereal feast is also maintained amongst Vlax Romanies, where potatoes and peanuts are
forbidden at a pomàna.
The military connection has been explored from the historian’s perspective by Marsh
(2004) who, rather than (or perhaps in addition to) seeing the koïné as having originated within
the Rajput’s own environment, says (op. cit.)
The development of the military koiné happened, I suggest, in the Ghaznāvid armies amongst
mawālī troops (‘client’ soldiers) of Indian units, Qīqanīyya or Kīkanīyya, as a result of the need to
communicate across dialectical and regional differences . . . The assaults on the region of northern
India following the accession of Amir, later Sultan Mahmud of Ghaznā (Mahmūd b. Sebüktigin,
sometimes Mahmūd-i Zābulī 998-1030), [and his part in] the dislocation of Indian peoples as
infantry, elephant-drivers, prisoners of war, craftspeople and artisans, and their incorporation into
the Ghaznāvid state, centered in what is now eastern Afghanistan. These were a continuation of
his father’s policy of raiding the sub-continent in assaults against Shi’ite Multan and other centres
of the Ismā’īlī Muslims of Sindh, and also the pagan Hindus. The resources of India were needed
in order to finance the professional, multi-ethnic standing army of the Ghaznāzvids. The
expansion of Ghaznā during Mahmūd’s rule followed the important razzias of 1018-1019 against
the cities of the northern Ganges, including Kannauj.
The significance of Kannauj has been explored by Courthiade, who goes so far as to claim it to
be the ultimate home of the Romanies (2004:105-124); this has been pointedly—though
unconvincingly—attacked by “Im Nin’alu,” who argues elsewhere for a Jewish origin for Roma
(2004:3): A recent theory that is having some success among the intellectual environment interested in the
subject, and that is destined to be proven fallacious like all the preceding hypotheses, pretends to
28
have discovered the original “city” from where Roma might have come: Kannauj, in Uttar
Pradesh, India . . . the author founds the entire argumentation on an alleged linguistic proof that is
quite insufficient to explain the Romany cultural features not related to language and that are
undoubtedly much more relevant, and not any reliable evidence is given to support his theory .
The mixed nature of the Romani lexicon is exemplified by the numerals; one, two and
three are traceable to the Central group, four is Dardic, while five and six are of mixed origin
(John, 2006: 6). The language includes numbers of synonyms traceable to separate Indian
dialect groups, i.e. it cannot be linked with any single Indian language but has features from
several of them. There are three different words for “burn”: xačar-, thab- and phab-. The first
descends from OIA ksāti, the second from daghda- and the last from *bhabh-. The first is
mainly represented by the Central neo-Indic languages (Panjabi, Pahari, Jaunsari, &c.), the
second mainly by members of the eastern group (Bengali, Oriya, &c.), while there are no
descendants from the last other than in Romani. Except for Romani, no Indian language has
descendants from all three forms, though the first and second exist in Shina, Sindhi, Panjabi,
Kashmiri, Nepali and Gujerati.
There are two words for “wash,” xalav- and thov- (from OIA ksātlayati and dhauvati
respectively). In India the first is restricted to Pahari and Kumauni; the second is widespread in
all dialect groups. Only Kumauni (besides Romani) has both. There are two words for “sing”:
gilab- and bag- (from OIA gīta- and vādyāte respectively), the former restricted to Dardic and
Sinhalese, the latter to several mainly Central and Eastern Indian languages, but no language in
India includes both. There are three Romani words for “to scare,” trašav-, darav- and šas-, from
OIA traśati, dāryati and śāsati-; only Romani has all three. The first is restricted to Sindhi,
Lahnda, Panjabi and Kashmiri, the second to Assamese and Gujerati, and the third to Bengali.
The first and third occur in Nepali and Oriya, and the second and third in Hindi alone. Numbers
of these synonym clusters in Romani have been collected, and their analysis is still in progress.
To these, and as evidence of koïnéization may be added the two words for “two,” duj and do.
These are distinguished by case, do being the oblique form (an innovation—no languages in
India distinguish numerals by case). Duj is found in Nemadi, Kannauji, Pahari and Siraji, while
do is found almost everywhere else; only Chhattisgarhi and Pangwali have both, though as
synonyms, not as case-contrastive forms.
We might assume that there were even more such lexical clusters among the speakers of
Rajputic, some items from which were ultimately selected and others of which were discarded.
This would account for the uneven distribution of some Indic items in the European Romani
dialects—some restricted only to the Northern dialects (which includes Iberian) for example, and
would explain why Lomavren selected e.g. hath for “hand” while Romani (and for that matter
Domari) have the earlier (and Dardic) forms with /-s-/ (vast, xFst), or why Lomavren selected,
inter alia, the Indic ansev, solav and pantri (“apple,” “dog,”“bird”) while Romani selected the
Indic phabaj, d ukel and iriklo.
Typical of contact languages was the development of analytical numerals in Rajputic (cf.
New Guinea Pidgin English two-pela-ten-one, two-pela-ten-two, Cameroon Creole English twotali-one,
two-tali-two = 21, 22, &c.) instead of its having retained the original Indian fusional
forms; in the case of Romani the model was probably supplied by Persian, although for numbers
above twenty the linking word u (< Persian o) is replaced by ta (< OIA atha “and, also”). In
some dialects, u and ta are not used to link the Greek numerals seven, eight and nine, following
the Greek model instead (e.g. 19 = δέκ’ƒννέα); Indian models for six, seven, eight and nine are also lacking in Domari and Lomavren. In all three languages, the link-word for the teens differs
from that for all higher numbers: ......
8. Appearance in the West
Having established a date for a continuing presence in India, we need now to look for the earliest
documentation of a Romani presence in the West, because the window of time between both
dates must cover the timespan during which their exodus took place. While most earlier scholars
have placed the migration out of India some time well before AD 1000, some have placed it as
late as the 12th century—most recently Kochanowski, who argues for the date of departure of
Rajputs following the Muslim invasions led by Mohammed Ghori in AD 11917
(2003:341).
There are two likelier and earlier possibilities, the first, dated AD 1068, from Byzantium
reported the presence of “Lors” in that city but that may have been a reference to Luri, i.e. Dom,
rather than Romanies, but the second, dated some time in the latter part of the 1100s clearly
refers to Atsinganoi and Æguptoi, then as now the most usual names for Romanies. Fraser’s
important lexico-statistical analysis of Romani puts the beginnings of its linguistic split into the
different dialect groups in the Byzantine Empire at around AD 1040 (Fraser, 1989), while
Kalaydjieva et al.’s more recent findings place the migratory divisions into Europe beginning in
the 1200s (op. cit., 6): “The Gypsy group was born in Europe. All marker systems suggest that
the earliest splits occurred 20 to 24 generations ago, i.e. from the late 13th century onwards.” Yet
further evidence supporting the dates of movement out of India and into Europe argued for in this study is provided by a recent examination of a number of “private” genetic mutations that
are exclusively responsible for the specific disorders in the Romani people (Morar et al., 2004).
One in particular is a mutation that causes congenital myasthenia which is shared by Indian,
Pakistani and Romani patients and which was clearly brought out of India. Those researchers
used their genetic data to posit the date of the founding of the entire Romani population, and
estimated it to have taken place about 800-1000 years ago, with the subsequent splits (out of
Anatolia) into individual groups occurring between 400 and 600 years ago, with no evidence of
any such substructure prior to their estimated earliest date. These findings have generated some
interest in the scientific community—see for example Sellah (2004) and Brownlee (2004).
9. The Seljuq Factor
If this provides an explanation for where and how the pre-Romani population may have begun,
we are left having to explain how it reached the Byzantine Empire, the period of its history
barely ever addressed in the scholarship8
; nor has the crucial period spent in Anatolia been
properly acknowledged, though this is now being redressed with Adrian Marsh’s current
research and Nadia Demeter et al.’s “new approach” to Romani history, which includes “a
profound analysis of the Romany people’s three century sojourn in Byzantium . . . [which]
period is always very cursorily dealt with in scholarly works” (2000:321-334).
The Seljuqs, or rather the nomadic Sunni Türkmen who were the main military
component in the Seljuq polity during this period, provide this link. They were the force behind
the proto-Romani migration, driving the original Hindu army, defeated after Dandanqan (1040),
ahead of them: On May 24th, 1040, the Seljukid army attacked the Ghaznavids during their advance towards the
castle of Dandanakan . . . Sultan Mesud[’s . . .] command led to the disruption of the order of the
Ghaznavid army and to the defeat . . . slaves from the palace left the Ghaznavid army to pass to
the Seljukid side, joining the ones who had escaped before. Later, they attacked. This led to the
collapse and dispersal of the already exhausted, tired and destititute Ghaznavid army (Ghzel et al.,
2002: 105).
They spread out into Khorasan, Armenia and eastern Anatolia because of the complete collapse
of the Ghaznavids—which, it has been argued, was “because of Mahmud’s excessive reliance on
Hindu soldiers and generals” (Rikhye, 2006:2). They were part of an increasingly composite
group consisting of, beside themselves, Persians, Armenians, Greeks and other “refugees” from
what the 12th century Armenian historian Matthew of Eddesa described as the “perfidious nation
of the Turks”. It was standard practice for the conquering armies in Mongol-Turkic warfare to
push defeated populations ahead of them, in order to create fear and disruption to a maximum
degree. The Seljuqs were not especially interested in Anatolia, except to distract the Türkmen
from depredating the
Persian lands and causing enormous problems for the sedentary
population—which they succeeded in doing nevertheless, ultimately undermining the very fabric
of their empire. Only those based in Konya (Iconium) in central Anatolia remained powerful
enough eventually to set up the Rûm (i.e. “Rome”) sultanate, and only after the Mongols had
invaded at Baghdad and dealt a severe blow to the Great Seljuq Empire. The small Seljuq ruling
class in Rûm governed a population that was mostly Greek-speaking Anatolian Christian.
Ibni-Bibi describes how the Seljuqs forced the ghulams that surrounded the sultan to flee
from the field of battle during their last confrontation in his Seljukname (Bosworth, 2001: 37-39).
As the core of the Ghaznavid military machine, and infidels as far as the Muslim Seljuqs were
concerned, they could have expected no mercy upon the defeat of the Ghaznavid sultan. The
camp of the Ghaznavids was sacked after their defeat by the Seljuqs and their Turkoman allies,
and the remaining Hindus—the armorers, the grooms, the tent-makers, cooks, entertainers,
elephant keepers, shield-bearers, women and children all of whom would have been present,
since mediæval armies were societies on the move—fled westwards from the Seljuq onslaught
and would seem to have arrived in eastern Anatolia fairly soon afterwards using the Silk Road
from Marv, Rayy and through Khorasan into Armenia. The next encounter in the sources also
indicates the presence of nomads in tents outside the city walls of Ani, the centre of the Bagratid
kingdom, when the Seljuqs destroyed it in 1064 AD. Marsh suggests (in p.c.) that this was likely
the last point at which the Hindus from Ghazna, together with a host of other refugees who
joined them along the roads in eastern Anatolia are defeated and lose their military capacity,
being reduced to the artisans, entertainers, servitors and ‘hangers on’ that any army carried along
with it during this period. Matthew of Edessa describes how the this conglomeration of princes,
noblewomen and the mass of people moving up and down the highways of Asia Minor after this
event constituted what he described as a ‘vagabond nation.’ The destruction of the Armenian
Bagratid kingdom marked the end of Byzantine control of Asia Minor and the beginnings of
what Vyronis has called the Islamification of the Anatolian region, and the settlement of the
Turks. The references to the arrival of the ‘Egyptians’ in Sulukule (the Mesotechion section of
the walls around Constantinople near the River Lycus) is well documented and is described by
Soulis (op. cit., 142-165). The loss of the Hindus’ primary military function and capacity was
due to their defeat by the Seljuqs and the decimation of the warrior elite that were very close to
the Ghaznavid sultans, though they always maintained their religion, or at least elements of it,
and some military involvement was still in evidence at the time of the move across into Europe
(see below).
Bosworth writes that “Indian troops passed from the Ghaznavid to the Seljuq armies;
troops, if not formally made prisoners of war, often joined the bandwagon of the winning side”
very willing to turn against their captors, while Leiser surmised that “after the Seljuqs defeated
the Ghaznavids they ‘appropriated’ their prisoners of war; such action was fairly commonplace
in those days” and, citing the work of the Turkish historian Köyman, which provides several
sources, goes on to say that “after the victory at Dandanqan, soldiers from throughout Khurasan,
‘some of whom may have served the Ghaznavids,’ joined the Seljuqs.” Marsh (2003) also notes
that Sindhi warriors : . . . had been present in the Persian lands since the early fifth century AD, often as auxiliaries to
the Sassanid armies of Persia or as remnants of a defeated and ‘decapitated’ military society . . .
subsequently the Seljuks of Rûm had acquired large numbers of these troops and their retinues, in
the aftermath of their defeat of Mahmud’s heir, Mas’ud on the steppes of Dandanaqan, 23rd May
1040. These combatants were, as all armies in the early mediaeval period, effectively societies on
the move, with the fighting force making up approximately one third of the total number. The rest
would have been the armourers, grooms, smiths and metalworkers, carpenters, military engineers,
servants and servitors, tent-makers, cooks, bakers, washer-women, slaves, camp-followers and
children.
Located to the south-east of the Byzantine Empire, Armenia fell to armies directed by the
Seljuqs in AD 1071 and the foundation was laid for the establishment of a new sultanate called
Rum, occupying former Armenian and some Byzantine territory in Anatolia—the area that is
today Turkey. Fraser, supporting the conclusion reached in the important earlier work of Soulis
32
wrote that “the appearance of the Gypsies in Byzantine lands is undoubtedly connected with the
Seljuk raids in Armenia” (emphasis added), though he would have been nearer the mark if he
had called these instead Thrkmen raids. It is also probably more accurate to regard the incoming
Indians as part of the co-opted Ghaznavids and as allies, with the Armenians as the antagonists,
and not as joint protagonists along with the Seljuqs.
Marsh goes on to suggest that the establishment of groups who were to become Romanies
in Anatolia was the result of the Seljuqs’ policy of establishing beyliks, that is to say granting
autonomous fiefdoms within Rûm to bands of their warriors. While this early connection with
Sindh is well documented, it must be taken as geographical rather than as necessarily linguistic,
since many languages besides Sindhi are (and were) spoken in that part of India. The
comparative wordlists above do not demonstrate a particularly close lexical relationship between
Romani and Sindhi.
While it is documented that “Indians” were brought into Byzantine territory by the
Seljuqs “usually in a military capacity,” nowhere are those Indians referred to specifically as
either Rajputs or Rom. We would not expect the former, since it is an Indian word and only a
minority of the Indians would have been Rajputs in any case, and if, as is proposed here, the
Romani population did not come into existence until the Byzantine period, then “Rom” had not
yet become a label.
One self-designation found among Romanies in the Balkans is Romi—a Slavic plural,
though the word is also found in non-Slavic-speaking Romania. Romi (< √:≅4, √:∀4≅4)
seems to have been used consistently in Byzantium after about 1070 to refer to all the inhabitants
of Rum, especially after the history of Michael Attaliates, who wrote from the perspective of a
military official in a twelve-year period leading up to Manzikert (1071). The Arabs used it in its
Arabic form (Rûmi) from about the same time, as part of the titles in diplomatic correspondence
between the Mamluk Sultans and the Byzantine Emperors, according to a recent article by
Korobeinikov (2004). It was probably used regularly in Europe in the aftermath of the Great
Schism (1054), as focus turned to concerns for crusades and the Holy Lands. Ibn Battuta refers
to Rum in his mid-14th century account of travels through Asia Minor to Central Asia (Gibb &
Bechingham, 1994) and specifically mentions that from the earliest times (i.e. since the contact
between Arabs and Byzantium), it was called Rum to designate the lands ruled, or once ruled in
his time, by the Romans. In that sense, it seems that the Arab invasions and conflicts with the
Byzantines in the 7th and 8th centuries probably resulted in the emergence of the notion of the
Rhomaioi or Rhomoi by the eleventh century. Marsh argues that the Indian population in
Anatolia became ethnicized into the Romiti by the 1300s, i.e. into the forerunners of the Romani
people. Significantly, there is a population of nomadic metal workers living in the West Bank
who are referred to as ‘Kurds,’ but who call themselves r m or r mat (Matras, 1999:7).9
IoviŃă & Schurr (2004: 275), whose very valuable article on genetic evidence for Romani
identity goes far to support the proposals in the present paper, do question specifically my
military koïné hypothesis (Hancock, 2000), arguing that “the defeat of the Rajputs by the Muslim
Ghaznavids in the 12th century . . . is difficult to reconcile with historical data that places Gypsies
in the Byzantine Empire before this time—around the 10th-11th centuries.” However, they have
confused Kochanowski’s later dates with my own; the Ghaznavid invasions took place between
AD 1000-1027, not in the 12th century as Kochanowski has it; furthermore, we cannot be sure
that the earliest references to people identified as “Gypsies” in the Byzantine Empire were Rom
rather than Dom.
The late and much missed Milena Hübschmannová (2000; 2004) too was bothered by the
33
time frame, questioning the linguistic evidence because it supports an 11th century exodus when
the presence of Romanies in Byzantium is also recorded for the same century: Roma professor Ian Hancock le Redžosko of Texas University in Austin (USA) believes that
Roma – originally Rajput fighters whose army was composed of a great variety of castes – left
India because of the Muslim invasions. Troupes led by General al Qasim began the invasions with
the conquest of Sindh in 712. The wars peaked with twenty-one border raids led by Mahmud of
Ghazni (beginning of 11th century). Hancock dates the departure of the Roma from India back to
exactly the time of Mahmud. Hancock bases his theory on linguistics: according to him, modern
Indic languages lost their neuter gender, and neuter words were absorbed by the masculine gender.
Hancock (2001) presents a table in which he compares the genders of Romani words with related
Hindi words. His theory is interesting, but if Athingani (very probably Roma) were already in
Byzantium in the eleventh century, they would scarcely have left India in the same century
Of course the loss of the MIA neuter isn’t according to Hancock, but to the specialists in
this area such as Masica and Bloch, mentioned above. I have simply applied it to the Romani
case.
Historical evidence points to the Seljuqs, or their main fighting force the Thrkmen, as the
link accounting for this span of time (which easily allows for such a migration to have taken
place within a century); they defeated the Ghaznavids in AD 1038 and AD 1041 and took their
prisoners of war to use as their own fighting force and as a front-line “buffer” in their move
towards Anatolia. Tsaggas (2006:21-23) writes about the Seljuqs’ arrival in Bagdad, Ani,
Manzikert, Edessa, Nicaia, Antioch, Tripoli and Jerusalem in company with Indians from the
Panjab (“Pentopotamia”), probably acquired in Khurasan or Manzikurt from the Ghaznavids.
Lee has recorded seldjuko meaning “Turk” in the speech of his principal Kalderash-speaking
informant Russell Demetro.
Like the Shahi administrators before them, the Seljuqs too used Persian as their lingua
franca. Kjeilen (2003:1) says
The Seljuqs made Esfahan their capital, and they started to use the Persian language in the
administration of their new state. The Seljuq sultans also sponsored Persian, and they were
effectively propagators of the language to the entire Persian continent.
10. Anatolia and the Emergence of the Romani People and Language
Almost a century ago Colocci (loc. cit.) saw the move from India to the Byzantine Empire as
having been “very rapid;” but if that took only two or three decades, the stay in Anatolia itself
lasted for over two centuries, and was crucial to the emergence of the Romani people. As an
already ethnically and linguistically mixed population, bound together by former occupation and
now social circumstance, the Indians not only intermarried with each other but with the local
people as well. Social and caste barriers to marriage that are strictly maintained within India
become relaxed in diasporic Indian populations; this is clearly evident in Indian communities in
e.g. Fiji, Mauritius or Trinidad.
Byzantine society was ethnically diverse and included many different peoples and
languages, though the lingua franca was Greek and the national religion Orthodox Christianity.
It may be relevant that while Greek was the everyday language of Constantinople (Byzantium),
situated on the European side of the Bosporus, and was the administrative language throughout
the Empire, it was not the only language spoken at the popular level throughout the rest of the
land. Children newly born into this community must have been exposed to a variety of languages, including the Rajputic of their own parents and the Greek being spoken all around
them. We may well suppose that the Romani language, and the Romani people, came into
existence in the Byzantine Empire during this time; this being the case, reconstructing protoRomani
as a discrete pre-Byzantine Indian language is not possible, though a more detailed
description of Rajputic is underway.
The influence of Byzantine Greek in the makeup of the Romani language cannot be
underestimated (see Grant, 2003); not only does it constitute the second largest percentage of the
pre-European vocabulary after the Indian words, being found in every semantic area (even in the
numerals), but it has also contributed to fundamental areas of the grammar, such as the different
words for the definite article ‘the’, losing the Indian grammatical feature of ergativity, and the
change of the basic NIA syntactic ordering from subject-object-verb to subject-verb-object. The
middle voice which Rajko Djurić argues is evidence of Romani’s great age may equally well
have been acquired from Greek, as well as the shift of the Indic dative to the Balkan accusative.
Athematic final and non-final affixes of Greek origin include inter alia –in, -os, -is, -mos, -mata,
-itza (also Slavic), -itko, -me(n), verbal –as, -is, -azo, -izo, -isar- and -ar-. The synthetic
construction modeled on Greek Β∴≅ (in Romani po, relexified by maj, meg, &c., in other
dialects) before comparative adjectives (po-baro “bigger”) replaces—or was selected—in some
dialects rather than the Iranic/Ossetic enclitic –der (bareder “bigger”; see Hancock, 1995:33
for further discussion of this). A semantic calque is found in the Romani verb be -, which
means both “sit” and “reside,” a dual reference not found in any Indian language, but paralleled
in Byzantine Greek 6∀2∴.Τ “sit; settle in a place; (of an army) encamp” (Liddell & Scott,
1980:339)10
.
11. Into Europe
The main move up into Europe was also the result of Islamic expansion, this time initiated by the
Ottoman Turks, who eventually sacked Byzantium in AD 1453 and extended their influence up
into the Balkans, though it would be wrong to think that this migration happened all at one time.
The bubonic plague (the “black death”) had reached western Anatolia by 1347 for instance, and
forced a general migration across into Europe that surely included some Romanies, since they
were blamed for having introduced it. Linguistic evidence points to the Romani language
existing in three distinct overlapping strata across Europe (see Courthiade, 1994); there are very
few Greek words, including the definite articles, in at least one European Romani dialect
(Istriani, spoken in Slovenia, see Cech & Heinschink, 2001), suggesting a very early move out of
Anatolia before the heavy lexical impact of Greek had affected it11
.
Not only was Islam a key factor in the move into Europe, as it was in the move out of
India, but both events also shared a military aspect, since the Ottoman Turks used the Romanies
“as direct participants (in their militia), mainly as servants in the auxiliary detachments or as
craftsmen servicing the army” as Marushiakova & Popov have written. By the 1300s, there were
specifically military garrisons of Romanies at both Modon and Nauplia, in Venetian
Peloponnesia, today southern Greece. The Romanies had arrived in Europe.
We do not know how the various groups of Romanies first entered Europe. Most
presumably crossed the isthmus at Constantinople, though it has been suggested that others left
Anatolia by boat across the Aegean or even the Black Sea (Gheorge, 1983: 13). In whatever way
they reached the Balkans, they continued to move on in all directions, being reported in almost
every country in Europe by 1500.
12. Questions
I am well aware that these hypotheses have been challenged by some of my colleagues, and I
welcome that. We are all working towards the discovery and documentation of Romani history,
and if theories can be shown to be baseless, then we can eliminate those lines of pursuit and
move on in other directions. So far, however, I have not seen any specific counterarguments
(though some relevant questions are raised in Matras, 2004b), and would like the following
points to be addressed. Perhaps a future conference might be organized to deal solely with these:
•If the migration out of India pre-dated AD 1000, how may we account for the reassignment of
formerly neuter nouns in Romani and their matching reassignment in languages still spoken in
India, as well as for other neo-Indic characteristics of the language?
•If the migration through Persia and the acquisition of Persian words took place in the 5th
century, why are all such items in Romani, Lomavren and Domari from
Modern (i.e. post-9th
-
10th century) Persian?12
•If the ancestors of the Romanies were not a military force, how may we account for the
significant number of military terms of Indian origin in Romani, and the corresponding paucity
of e.g. agricultural terms? If they were military but not Rajputs, who else could they have been?
Consider also the further non-linguistic arguments for Rajput identity made in Hancock (2000),
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