The Romani

The Arabic name al-Zuṭṭ, an arabization of the Indian ethnonym Jāṭ, applied in the early Islamic centuries to communities of Indian origin settled in the marshlands of lower Iraq, buffalo-keepers and soldiers transplanted by Sasanian and then Muslim rulers, prominent enough to mount a famous revolt against the caliphate in the ninth century that al-Ṭabarī chronicles at length. Later Arabic usage stretched the word into a general term for Indian-descended wanderers, and the Cairo Geniza and Syrian sources know Zuṭṭ far west of Iraq. The dispute is whether any of this belongs to the Romani: the Zuṭṭ were real and Indian, the Romani’s ancestors were real and Indian and crossed the same lands in the same centuries, and scholarship has connected and disconnected the two for two hundred years without a verdict.

The entry earns its place as the page’s cautionary layer. The names above it show societies mislabeling the Romani with confidence; al-Zuṭṭ shows the opposite failure, a label so broad that historians cannot now tell whether the people of this page are inside it. Somewhere among the Zuṭṭ of the chronicles the proto-Romani may well be standing, unmarked, one Indian migrant community among several the word swallowed. Every other name on the page names the Romani and means someone else; the Arabic name may mean the Romani and names everyone.

The Persian name, Lūlī, with its older doublet Lūrī, the word classical Persian used for the itinerant musician peoples of Iran, and the name around which Persian literature preserved an origin story: Ferdowsi tells how Bahrām Gūr, wanting music for his poor, asked the king of India for ten thousand Lūrī minstrels, settled them with oxen and seed-corn, and watched them eat the oxen and take to the roads forever, wanderers by royal appointment. By Ḥāfiẓ the lūlī is a stock figure of the ghazal, beautiful, disreputable, and free. The dispute the label records is the identification: tradition and much scholarship see in the legend a memory of the Indian migrations that produced the Romani and their Middle Eastern kin, but the story is legend, the word’s referent in any given text is simply “wandering musician,” and no Persian source knowingly names the Romani as such.

What the entry preserves is unlike anything else on the page. Byzantium and the West named the Romani by misclassification, from the outside, on arrival; Persia, which the migration crossed centuries earlier, kept instead an explanation, a story about who the wanderers were and why they wander, dressed as an episode of the national epic. The legend even gets the direction right, out of India westward, which is more than the “Egyptians” of the Latin record managed. On a page of names that are all mistakes of one kind or another, the Persian entry is the mistake that contains a map: wrong as history, it remembers the road.

The Byzantine name for the Romani, Atsínganoi, a name that belonged to someone else first: the Athínganoi, “the untouchables,” were an Anatolian heretical sect of the eighth and ninth centuries with a reputation for divination and strict purity taboos, and when a new people of itinerant fortune-tellers appeared in the empire, the dead sect’s label slid onto them. The earliest record is not even Greek but Georgian: the Life of St George the Athonite tells how Constantine IX brought “Adsincani, renowned sorcerers,” to rid the imperial park of wild beasts around 1054, and Balsamon’s twelfth-century canon commentary treats the athínganoi as a living presence to be kept from the faithful.

The entry is the headwater of the tsigane family, and its mechanism deserves the attention. Byzantium did not ask the newcomers who they were; it reached into its own past for the nearest available category, a heresy remembered for magic and untouchability, and named the strangers after its memory of other strangers. From that misapplied label descend the Latin Cigani of this page and, beyond the atlas’s edge, Tsigane, Zigeuner, Cigány, and țigan, the word by which half of Europe would name the Romani for six centuries, much of that time as a slur. The most consequential name on this page began as a case of mistaken identity inside a single empire’s filing system; Europe inherited the file, not the people.

The Sanskrit ḍomba, the name of the itinerant musician and performer castes of medieval India, attested across the lexica and, most vividly, in Kalhaṇa’s Rājataraṅgiṇī, the twelfth-century chronicle of Kashmir, where ḍomba singers rise scandalously high at royal courts and fall again. The word is the accepted etymon of the Romani self-name: Rom, with its kin Lom in Armenia and Dom across the Middle East, continues ḍomba through the regular sound changes of the migration, and the three branches preserve in their own names the Indian caste-world the migrants left. The dispute is one of referent, not derivation: ḍomba in its Sanskrit attestations names groups inside India, and no Sanskrit text names the departed diaspora; the entry stands on this page the way Kaptara stands on Crete’s, the ancestor of the name rather than the name itself.

It is nonetheless the only word on the page that the Romani would recognize as their own. Every other entry records what someone called them; ḍomba is what, through thirty generations of sound change, they have never stopped calling themselves. The atlas holds the endonym after all, hidden at the page’s root: unwritten in Europe until after 1453, the name Rom was in writing all along, in Sanskrit, in a Kashmirian chronicle composed while the migration was still on the road. The people every language on this page misnamed carried the correct answer with them the entire time.

The Latin name under which the Romani enter the Western European record, Cigani, the Byzantine Atsínganoi worn down by its passage through the Balkans and Hungary. Its anchor attestation is a legal document: in 1423 the emperor-king Sigismund issued a safe-conduct at Spiš for “Ladislaus Wayuoda Ciganorum,” Ladislaus voivode of the Cigani, commanding his towns to protect the voivode’s people from hindrance or harassment. The same decade scatters the companies across the chronicles of Italy, France, and the Empire, usually under a second, stranger name, for the travelers presented themselves as pilgrims from Little Egypt, and the record calls them dukes and counts of Egypt as often as anything else; that misnomer, the future Gypsy and Gitano, never settled into one stable Latin form within this atlas’s window.

The entry catches the moment a people acquires legal existence in a new civilization, and the terms of it. The safe-conduct is protection, which means it is also classification: to move through Christendom the companies needed a name the chancery could write, and the name the chancery wrote was Byzantium’s old mistake, now two languages and four centuries from the heresy it originally meant. Everything about the document is characteristic of the centuries that followed, a people defined in other men’s paperwork, under a borrowed name, with their safety contingent on a king’s seal. The atlas’s youngest name for any people is also its bluntest lesson in who gets to write.