Romani History

The Romani people, also referred to as the Roma, are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group that primarily lives in Europe. They may have migrated north from present-day Rajasthan to present-day Punjab around 250 BC. They may also have migrated from the present-day Sindh. Their subsequent westward migration out of South Asia is believed to have occurred in waves, beginning in the 5th century. It has been suggested that a wave of emigration from India may have taken place during the raids by Mahmud of Ghazni. As these soldiers were defeated, they were moved west with their families into the Byzantine Empire.

The author Ralph Lilley Turner has theorised a central Indian origin of the Romani, followed by a migration to northwest India, as the Romani language shares a number of ancient isoglosses with Central Indo-Aryan languages in relation to realization of some sounds of Old Indo-Aryan. This is lent further credence by its sharing exactly the same pattern of northwestern languages such as Kashmiri and Shina through the adoption of oblique enclitic pronouns as person markers. The overall morphology suggests that Romani participated in some of the significant developments leading toward the emergence of New Indo-Aryan languages, thus indicating that the proto-Romani did not leave the Indian subcontinent until late in the second half of the first millennium.

Origin

The Romani people originate in South Asia, where they likely formed part of the caste groups known as Doma, meaning "drummers". According to Sharma, groups assigned these caste positions by Brahminic society likely originated as non-Indo-Aryan tribal populations absorbed in the Gupta period.

The exact location of their origin in South Asia is not known, but linguistic evidence suggests migration from modern-day northern–central India, or less probably northwestern regions of India and eastern Pakistan.

The Romani have been described by Diana Muir Appelbaum as unique among peoples, because they have never identified themselves with a territory. They have no tradition of an ancient and distant homeland from which their ancestors migrated, nor do they claim the right to national sovereignty in any of the lands where they reside. Rather, Romani identity is bound up with the ideal of freedom expressed, in part, in having no ties to a homeland. The absence of a written history has meant that the origin and early history of the Romani people was long an enigma. Indian origin was suggested on linguistic grounds as early as the late 18th century.

In the Roma language, "rom" means husband/man, while "romňi" means wife/woman, and thus "roma" means "husbands/people". Some theories suggest that the ancestors of the Romani were part of the military in northern India. One modern theory states that during the invasions of Mahmud of Ghazni, defeated soldiers were moved west with their families into the Byzantine Empire, between AD 1000 and 1030. However, linguistic evidence shows that Romani speakers were in contact with Armenian by the 9th century and Anatolian Greek by the 10th, which suggests their migration from Greece must have occurred during the second half of the first millennium.

Genetic evidence has identified a South Asian origin of the Roma. This makes the Romani descendants of people who emigrated from South Asia towards Central Asia during the medieval period.

Linguistic origins

Until the mid-to-late 18th century, theories about the origin of the Romani were mostly speculative. In 1782, Johann Christian Christoph Rüdiger published his research findings, in which he pointed out the relationship between the Romani language and Hindustani. Subsequent work supported the hypothesis that Romani shared a common origin with certain Indo-Aryan languages in the north of the Indian subcontinent.

Evidence shows that the Romani language is part of the Central Aryan branch of the Indo-Aryan language family (like Hindi/Urdu), but that it also contains innovations found only in the Northwestern branch (containing Punjabi and Sindhi). The ''Palgrave Handbook of Romani Linguistics'' argues that this may demonstrate an origin in an area between the two dialect zones, which was largely conservative but affected to some degree by the changes occurring in the northwest. However, it does not discount the possibility that there was an initial migration from the central region by the proto-Roma, before a period of residence in the northwest.

Domari and Romani languages

Domari was once thought to be the "sister language" of Romani, and that the two languages had split after the Romani departed from the subcontinent, but based on more recent research findings, they should be considered two separate languages within the Central zone (Hindustani) Saraiki language group, as the differences between them are significant. Therefore, the Dom and the Rom are probably descendants of two different groups of people who migrated from the Indian subcontinent in two different waves, several centuries apart.

Genetic evidence

Further evidence for the South Asian origin of the Romanis came in the late 1990s. Researchers doing DNA analysis discovered that Romani populations carried large frequencies of particular Y chromosomes (inherited paternally) and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) (inherited maternally) that otherwise exist only in populations from South Asia.

47.3% of Romani men carry Y chromosomes of haplogroup H-M82, which is rare outside South Asia. Mitochondrial haplogroup M, most common in Indian subjects and rare outside southern Asia, accounts for nearly 30% of Romani people. A more detailed study of Polish Roma shows this to be of the M5 lineage, which is specific to India. Moreover, a form of the inherited disorder congenital myasthenia is found in Romani subjects. Caused by the 1267delG mutation, it is otherwise known only in subjects of Indian ancestry. This is considered to be the best evidence of the Indian ancestry of the Romanis.

The Romanis have been described as "a conglomerate of genetically isolated founder populations". The number of common genetic disorders found among Romanis from all over Europe indicates "a common origin and founder effect".

A study from 2001 by Gresham et al. suggests "a limited number of related founders, compatible with a small group of migrants splitting from a distinct caste or tribal group". The study also points out that "genetic drift and different levels and sources of admixture, appear to have played a role in the subsequent differentiation of populations". The same study found that "a single lineage ... found across Romani populations, accounts for almost one-third of Romani males".

A 2004 study by Morar et al. concluded that the Romanis are descended from "a founder population of common origins that has subsequently split into multiple socially divergent and geographically dispersed Romani groups". The same study revealed that this population "was founded approximately 32–40 generations ago, with secondary and tertiary founder events occurring approximately 16–25 generations ago".

There is genetic evidence of major mixing with Balkan peoples during the time of the Ottoman Empire.

Connection to the Burushos and Pamiris

The Burushos of Hunza have a paternal-lineage genetic marker that is grouped with Pamiri speakers from Afghanistan and Tajikistan as well as the Sinti ethnic group. This find of shared genetic haplogroups may indicate an origin of the Romani people in or around those regions.

Possible connection to the Domba people

According to a genetic study on the phylogeography of Y-chromosome haplogroup H1a1a-M82 in 2012, the ancestors of present Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes of northern India, traditionally referred to collectively as the Ḍoma, are the likely ancestral populations of modern European Roma.

Romani origins based on autosomal and mitochondrial data

Mitochondrial or Y-chromosome haplotype studies provide valuable information, but a limitation of these types of studies is that they each represent only one instantiation of the genealogical process. Autosomal data permits simultaneous analysis of multiple lineages, which can provide novel information about population history. According to a genetic study on autosomal data, the two populations showing closest relatedness to Roma were Punjabis and Kashmiris, who also happen to have the highest West Eurasian-related ancestry among South Asians. However, according to a study on genome-wide data published in 2019, the putative origin of the proto-Roma involves a Punjabi group with low levels of West Eurasian ancestry. The classical and mtDNA genetic markers suggested the closest affinity of the Roma with Rajput and Punjabi populations from northwestern India.

Early records

Early records of itinerant populations from India begin as early as the Sassanid period. British linguist Donald Kenrick notes the first recorded presence of '' Zott'' in Baghdad in AD 820, Khanaqin in AD 834.

Contemporary scholars have suggested one of the first written references to the Romanis, under the term '' Atsingani'', (derived from the Greek ''ἀτσίγγανοι – atsinganoi''), dates from the Byzantine era during a time of famine in the 9th century. In the year AD 800, Saint Athanasia gave food to "foreigners called the Atsingani" near Thrace. Later, in AD 803, Theophanes the Confessor wrote that Emperor Nikephoros I had the help of the ''Atsingani'' to put down a riot with their "knowledge of magic". However, the Atsingani were a Manichean sect that disappeared from chronicles in the 11th century. The name ''Atsinganoi'' was used to refer to itinerant fortune tellers, ventriloquists, and wizards who visited emperor Constantine IX in the year 1054.

Roma skeletal remains exhumed from Castle Mall in Norwich, UK, have been radiocarbon-dated by liquid scintillation spectrometry to circa 930–1050AD.

Gilbert White's ''The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne'' records a report from John Bell of "Gypsies" travelling from Tartary towards China in the early 18th century.

Arrival in Europe

Romani people first arrived in Europe via the Balkans sometime between the 7th and 14th centuries from South Asia, through Iran, Armenia, and Anatolia.

In 1323, Simon Simeonis, an Irish Franciscan friar, described people in likeness to the "atsingani" living in Crete: "We also saw outside this city Candia] a tribe of people, who worship according to the Byzantine Rite, Greek rite, and assert themselves to be of the race of Cain. These people rarely or never stop in one place for more than thirty days, but always, as if cursed by God, are nomad and outcast. After the thirtieth day they wander from field to field with small, oblong, black, and low tents, like those of the Arabs, and from cave to cave, because the place inhabited by them becomes after the term of thirty days so full of vermin and other filth that it is impossible to live in their neighbourhood."

In 1350, Ludolf von Sudheim mentioned a similar people with a unique language, whom he called ''Mandapolos'', a word that some theorize was possibly derived from the Greek word ''Mantipolos – Μαντιπόλος''
frenzied
from ''mantis – μάντις'' (meaning "prophet, fortune teller") and ''poleo – πολέω''.

Around 1360, a fiefdom (called the '' Feudum Acinganorum'') was established in Corfu. It mainly used Romani serfs, and the Romani on the island were subservient.

By the 14th century, the Romani had reached the Balkans and Bohemia; by the 15th century, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal; and by the 16th century, Russia, Denmark, Scotland, and Sweden (although DNA evidence from mid-11th century skeletons in Norwich suggest that at least a few individuals may have arrived earlier, perhaps due to Viking enslavement of Romani from the eastern Mediterranean, or liaisons with the Varangians

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