4 ms·
Contemporary scholarship holds that at least a large portion of the Roma had already left India for Persia long before the Mongol invasion.
by OfSanguineFire 3y ago
Contemporary scholarship holds that at least a large portion of the Roma had already left India for Persia long before the Mongol invasion.
- gumballindie 3y agoInteresting. I find it frustrating that there is little coherent documentation available on this topic.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoThe documentation is less incoherent than you assume. My own background is in linguistics, so I am familiar with the literature on the history of the Roma that take evidence of historical language contact into account. The relevant chapter in Matras’ Romani: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2004) has a pretty accessible overview of prior scholarship and the modern state of the art. As Matras points out, interaction between the Romani and the Byzantine Greeks was ongoing from the eleventh century at the latest, so they had left India well before the Mongol invasion (which happened in the mid-twelfth century).
- gumballindie 3y agoThank you for sharing this. I will look it up in more detail.