by Gail Kavanagh

Created on: November 11, 2008

I grew up among gypsies, and like many others, believed their origin to be Egyptians. This was certainly the origin of the name given to these nomadic people. Dark and swarthy, they were thought to look like Egyptians, and to have wandered from that land in ancient times. Some even believed them to be a lost tribe of Israel.

The Romany, or Rom, as they call themselves have been assigned many different origins, some more romantic than others - for example, it was once thought they were the remnants of Atlantis. In the novel Star of Gypsies, science fiction author Robert Silverberg speculated that they came from the stars, and established Atlantis, becoming earthly wanderers after its destruction.

But now science has proved the true origin of the gypsies. DNA tests on European gypsies have shown their lineage to be Central Asian - Professor Luba Kalaydjieva and her team at the University of Western Australia studied the genetics of gypsies for ten years and have concluded that their DNA shows them to have originated in India 1000 years ago.

There has been specultaion for two centuries that gysies came from India, due to the similarities between the Romany language and Sanskrit, the language of India. But as gypsies are often multilingual and picked up languages from all over the world, this was not seen as solid evidence. The DNA evidence, however, is harder to refute.

Their gene pool has remained strong because Gypsies guard their culture fiercely, and tend to keep marriage within their own people. European gypsies, in particular, have sffered much persecution, and do not trust the `giorgios' as they call non-gypsies. Hitler and his Nazi regime sent a known quarter of a million gypsies to die in concentration camps, and the actual figure could be as high as half a million.

Gypsies have been traditionally regarded as undesireables, shuffled from place to place, much as the Jews in the Middle Ages, another fact that well may have led to the belief that they were a lost tribe of Israel.

The wandering tribes who emerged from India around the end of the first millenium, and spread into Europe in the beginning of the second millenium, were a nomadic people who carried their culture and their possessions with them, on foot or in wagons. They quickly aroused suspicion and even hatred among the `settled' people, and the stage was set for a thousand years of misrepresentation and prejudice.

They travelled in closely knit extended family groups and became adept at finding their own ways to make a living. As well as selling hand made items such as baskets and clothes pegs door to door, these have included fortune telling (known as `dookering'), sharpening knives, repairing pots and collectging scrap metal for resale.

In spite of repeated acts of near genocide, the gypsies have survived. Today they number about eight million, and have spread beyond Asia and Europe in the new worlds of the Americas and Australia. Three gyspsies sailed with Columbus to the New World as slaves on his third voyage, and others were sent out on other voyages as slaves.

Like the Jews, who were forced into usury in the Middle Ages, the gypsies were not allowed to hold property or make a decent living and were forced into dubious professions such as fortune telling. That they have managed to keep their gene pool so strong that it can be tied to the region in India where they originated is a testament to their survival skills.

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