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Write a 6 pages paper on romani culture and gypsy identity. According to Fraser (1992), the first written evidence appears in Persia in the writings of the Arabian historian Hamza of Ispahan (c.950), which place the origins in musicians sent from India at the request of the then king. It was there that Roma developed its characteristic features we know today, and where its strange and indecipherable dialect currently spoken developed, heavily influenced by the Persian, into three main branches. Fraser ((1992) also suggests that Persian conquests in India may have also contributed to the migration of groups which eventually became the Roma in about 227 A.D.

Pre-history must be considered murky at best. Marushiakova, Popov, Kenrick (2001) generally concede that the Roma began, in a chronology of migrations, leaving Persia for Europe in the fifth century, driven by the White Hun invasion from Central Asia. In later centuries it was the result of Arab invasions and the collapse of the Persian Empire. One Roma group settled in Syria, Palestine and eventually made their way to Spain. A second lesser group settled in the Caucasus, and a third largest group in the Balkans, “within the boundaries of the Byzantine Empire” (Marushiakova, Popov, Kenrick, 2001, p. 13). In 1893 the Hungarian kingdom “sought to find a solution to the so-called problem of wandering gypsies who were considered an anachronism in a modern centralized state” (Cohen, 1995, p.136). This combined with the dissolution of slavery can be construed as the possible genesis of more massive migrations to Western Europe and indeed, to a lesser degree, other countries including North and South America.