l'Asie, Leiden 1903). It is this Arabian interlude that Gaster doubts; but Basra is hardly in Arabia: a predatory horde somehow carried by sea (?) from India might easily remain unaffected by the surrounding dialects. But almost equally strong is the evidence of a Danubic origin, in the lands held six centuries before Christ by the Sigynnæ. Did Simeon's captives in the marts of Alexandria (1322) buy back their freedom and return to their old home, bringing with them the name Egyptian? It seems certain that the expression 'Little Egypt' means Palestine and the Holy Land, or (in later times) the small tract still held by the Crusaders, together with certain islands in Levant, under the military monks. (Of this connexion with the Holy Land we must speak later, when on the subject of gipsy religion.) Now in the East, according to Gaster, 'Egyptian' is resented as a term of contempt, while 'zigan' is not felt to be an insult: in Hungary there is a term in use pharao nephka, Pharaoh's folk, and in Rumania farao simply denotes the people. As for the Athingans, they were clearly a branch (or supposed branch) of the Paulician dualists who spread westwards in the Middle Ages. Now many of these were deliberately transplanted by Roman emperors (from 700) into Rumelia and given homes near Adrianople and Philippopolis. Continually travelling west they were called by any and every name of eastern import: Bogomils and Patarenes became 'Bulgarians' to the French, and gipsies and heretics alike were called 'Bohemians ' (cf. the sect of böhmische bruder).
The Gipsies, as an Accursed Race, Doomed to Wander.
8. Gaster draws our notice to a passage in the Syriac (apocryphal) Cave of Treasures, compiled perhaps in Justinian's reign: 'The Egyptians were of the seed of Canaan and were scattered over the face of the earth and
