“The Academy of March 27 last published an interesting letter which only came to my knowledge a few days ago. In this letter Mr. Richard Burton, F.R.G.S., claims the priority in identifying the Gipsies or Tsigans with the Jat of the banks of the Indus, whose name, he adds, is pronounced Dyat. The question has lately been treated at length (25 pages in 8vo, almost entirely consecrated to this subject) by Professor J. de Goeje, of Leyden, who attributes the first idea of this identification to Mr. Pott in 1853, as is stated in the Academy of February 27, in a short article mentioning this Dutch Contribution to the History of the Gipsies.
“Mr. Burton, who has wandered far and wide in the Valley of the Indus, and has much frequented the Jats, published in 1849 a grammar of the Játaki dialect (41 pages), which contains an interesting classification of this race, reproduced in his letter, and, in 1851, a volume upon Sindh—Sindh and the Races that inhabit the Valley of the Indus—in which he starts the theory of a probable relationship between the Jats and the Gipsies, as proved in the extracts which he commences by giving of this work.
“Allow me to claim a still earlier priority (dating from 1849), and to begin by establishing exactly the share belonging to each.
“Professor Pott, in his great work, Die Zigeuner, Vol. I. (1844), p. 62, had spoken of the tradition mentioned by Ferdoussy, by the Tarikh-Guzydeh, and ‘by another ...’ that is to say, by the Modjmel-al-Tevarykh, according to which Bahram-Gur, King of Persia, had caused ten or twelve thousand musicians, designated in two at least of these three texts under the name of Luri,[99] to come from India. One or two other names, of which it is not necessary to speak, are added to this one. (See pp. 41, 42 of my memoir, published in 1849, and mentioned by-and-by.)
“Five years later, Professor Pott, coming back to the subject in his article ‘Ueber die Zigeuner,’ published, as a second supplement to his great work, in the Zeitschrift der Deut. Morgenl. Gesellschaft, Vol. III., 1849, said (p. 326):
“Concerning the tradition of which I spoke, Vol. I., p. 62, of the transmigration of Indian musicians into Persia, ordered by Bahram-Gur, and set forth in the Shahnameh, a tradition which is applied perhaps rightly to the Zigeuner, I owe to Fleischer a very interesting notice, and wholly unknown to me hitherto, drawn from Hamza Ispahani, Gottwaldt edition, 1834 (p. 40 of the translation of Gottwaldt), according to which Bahram-Gur, for the pleasure of his subjects, caused twelve thousand musicians, those designated by the name of Zuth, to come from India. They are called Luri in the Shahnameh[100], which is a proof that Hamza did not simply copy this fact. But Fleischer adds what follows relative to the name of Zuth, which I have not yet met with anywhere, and which was a complete enigma to me: ‘The Kamûz says that the Zotth are a race of men of Indian origin, and that the true pronunciation of this word is Djatt, but that the Arabs pronounce it Zotth.’ (See notes 3 and 4 at p. 43 of my memoir of 1849, concerning the rather free translation of this passage of the Kamûz.) In the French and Arabic Dictionary, by Ellious Bocthor, we find: ‘Bohémien, Arabe vagabond, Tchinghiané, qui dit la bonne aventure, vole, etc., is called Zotti at Damascus, plural Zotte.’
“Nothing more. It is clear that, in the identification of the Djat of India with the Tsigans, Professor Pott’s share is very small up to the present. The great Indianist of Halle is rich enough in his own learning to be content with what belongs to him, and the respect I entertain for him and his kind feeling towards me form a sure guarantee that he will not be offended at my setting forth my claim.
“I think I may say that it is I (thanks, it is true, to M. Reinaud) who first treated the question. I had published, in 1844, in the Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, a rather long memoir upon the Apparition des Bohémiens en Europe (the tirage à part, which is long ago exhausted, has 59 pages octavo). In 1849 I contributed to the same collection a second paper upon the same subject, examining especially Eastern Europe, and establishing for the first time that the Gipsies were in this region at an epoch far anterior to the date (about 1417) of their appearance in the West. I may add, incidentally, that nearly all those who have since spoken of the appearance of the Gipsies in Europe have done little more than draw upon these two memoirs, without always exactly saying what part belonged to me, so that I have often had the annoyance of seeing such or such an author, Francisque Michel more especially, mentioned afterwards in third-hand notices as the original source of what I had written. Now my second memoir (Nouvelles Recherches sur l’Apparition des Bohémiens en Europe, 48 pp. in the tirage à part, Paris, 1849: Franck, rue de Richelieu, 67) ends with an ‘Additional Note’ of ten very compact pages, the principal object of which is precisely to identify the Gipsies and the Indian Djath.
“In this note, or appendix, I begin by collecting and giving, in French, in order that they may be compared, the accounts that Professor Pott had only pointed out, relating to the ten or twelve thousand musicians that Bahram-Gur, King of Persia (420-440 of our era), had sent for from India, that is to say, the tradition related by Ferdoussy in the Shahnameh (about 1000), by the Modjmel-al-Tevarykh (about 1126), by the Tarikh-Guzydeh (about 1329, for this last I have not been able to give the text), and lastly, by Hamza Ispahani, the Arabian author whom Professor Fleischer had just made known to Professor Pott, and who is the oldest of all, since he belongs to the tenth century, while Professor Pott supposed him to have been posterior to Ferdoussy. It is to be remarked that Hamza mentions the descendants of the twelve thousand musicians as still existing in Persia in his time under the name of Zuth, and that Ferdoussy says the same of the ten thousand Luri, whom he represents as vagabonds and thieves. But the new and important point is the name of Zuth given to them by the Arabo-Persian author of the tenth century; and it is here, as I remark in my work (p. 42 of the tirage à part), ‘that the real interest commences.’