This designation owes its existence to the belief, common in the Middle Ages, that the Roma, or some related group (such as the Indian Dom people), were itinerant Egyptians.

[120] In his book The Zincali: an account of the Gypsies of Spain, George Borrow notes that when they first appeared in Germany, it was under the character of Egyptians doing penance for their having refused hospitality to Mary and her son.

[175] Romani and Domari share some similarities: agglutination of postpositions of the second layer (or case-marking clitics) to the nominal stem, concord markers for the past tense, the neutralisation of gender marking in the plural, and the use of the oblique case as an accusative.

[179] The following table presents the numerals in the Romani, Domari and Lomavren languages, with the corresponding terms in Sanskrit, Hindi, Odia, and Sinhala to demonstrate the similarities.

[196] The Ottoman occupation of the Balkans also left a significant genetic mark on the Y-DNA of the Roma there, creating a higher frequency of Haplogroups J and E3b in Romani populations from the region.

[201] A full genome autosomal DNA study on 186 Roma samples from Europe in 2019 found that modern Romani people are characterized by a common south Asian origin and a complex admixture from Balkan, Middle East, and Caucasus-derived ancestries.

In addition, they theorized of a possible low-caste (Dalit) origin for the Proto-Roma, since they were genetically closer to the Punjabi cluster that lacks a common marker characteristic of high castes, which is West Euroasian admixing.

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-Roma did not leave the Indian subcontinent until late in the second half of the first millennium.

[206][207] In February 2016, during the International Roma Conference, then Indian Minister of External Affairs, Sushma Swaraj stated that the people of the Romani community were children of India.

This designation owes its existence to the belief, common in the Middle Ages, that the Roma, or some related group (such as the Indian Dom people), were itinerant Egyptians.

Roma were ordered expelled from the Meissen region of Germany in 1416, Lucerne in 1471, Milan in 1493, France in 1504, Catalonia in 1512, Sweden in 1525, England in 1530 (see Egyptians Act 1530), and Denmark in 1536.

[247] Although some Roma could be kept as slaves in Wallachia and Moldavia until abolition in 1856, the majority traveled as free nomads with their wagons, as alluded to in the spoked wheel symbol in the Romani flag.

In Britain, Roma were sometimes expelled from small communities or hanged; in France, they were branded, and their heads were shaved; in Moravia and Bohemia, the women were marked by their ears being severed.

[255][256] An official inquiry from the Czech Republic, resulting in a report (December 2005), concluded that the Communist authorities had practised an assimilation policy towards Roma, which "included efforts by social services to control the birth rate in the Romani community.

[293] Bulgaria's popular "wedding music", too, is almost exclusively performed by Romani musicians such as Ivo Papasov, a virtuoso clarinetist closely associated with this genre and Bulgarian pop-folk singer Azis.

Most of the Ciganos of Portugal, the Gitanos of Spain, the Romanichal of Great Britain, and Scandinavian Travellers have lost their knowledge of pure Romani, and speak the mixed languages Caló,[307] Angloromany, and Scandoromani, respectively.

In western Europe, such suspicions and discrimination against people who constituted a visible minority resulted in persecution, often violent, with attempts to commit ethnic cleansing until the modern era.

The Spanish Crown ordered a nationwide raid that led to the break-up of families because all able-bodied men were interned in forced labor camps in an attempt to commit ethnic cleansing.

King Charles III took a more progressive approach to Gitano assimilation, proclaiming that they had the same rights as Spanish citizens and ending the official denigration of them which was based on their race.

[317][318] Most historians believe that Charles III's pragmática failed for three main reasons, reasons which were ultimately derived from its implementation outside major cities as well as in marginal areas: The difficulty which the Gitano community faced in changing its nomadic lifestyle, the marginal lifestyle to which the community had been driven by society and the serious difficulties of applying the pragmática in the fields of education and work.

During the war, the policy was extended to areas under German occupation, and it was also implemented by other axis countries, most notably, by the Independent State of Croatia, Romania, and Hungary.

[329] Amnesty International reports continued to document instances of Antizigan discrimination during the late 20th century, particularly in Romania, Serbia,[330] Slovakia,[331] Hungary,[332] Slovenia,[333] and Kosovo.

[340] A 2005 report by the Czech Republic's independent ombudsman, Otakar Motejl, identified dozens of cases of coercive sterilization between 1979 and 2001, and called for criminal investigations and possible prosecution against several health care workers and administrators.

[347] The 2019 Pew Research poll found that 83% of Italians, 76% of Slovaks, 72% of Greeks, 68% of Bulgarians, 66% of Czechs, 61% of Lithuanians, 61% of Hungarians, 54% of Ukrainians, 52% of Russians, 51% of Poles, 44% of French, 40% of Spaniards, and 37% of Germans held unfavorable views of Roma.

[350] Discrimination against Roma remains widespread in Kosovo,[351] Romania,[352] Slovakia,[353] Bulgaria,[354][355] and the Czech Republic,[356][357] against which the European Court of Human Rights has ruled in Romani advocates' favor on the subject of discriminatory and segregationist education and housing practices.

In retaliation a group of Roma, armed with hatchets and iron bars, attacked the police station of Saint-Aignan, toppled traffic lights and road signs and burned three cars.

[368] EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding stated that the European Commission should take legal action against France over the issue, calling the deportations "a disgrace".

[384][385] Many depictions of the Roma in literature and art present romanticized narratives of the mystical powers of fortune telling or as people who have an irascible or passionate temper paired with an indomitable love of freedom and a habit of criminality.

A Venetian Renaissance painting by Paris Bordone (c. 1530, Strasbourg) of the Holy Family in Egypt makes Elizabeth a Romani fortune-teller; the scene is otherwise located in a distinctly European landscape.