|
mark indigo -> RE: Flamenco originally came from India (Mar. 28 2009 14:50:40)
|
quote:
It is commonly accepted that the origin of the gypsies was India.
that's what i thought, having read a history of the gypsies, including the earliest written reference to gypsies being when the king of persia hired several thousand entertainers, musicians, jugglers, acrobats, etc., from rajastan....
but just this morning i read this in Gerald Howson's "Flamencos of Cadiz Bay":
"When I was in Cadiz, all the Spanish gitanos, like gypsies everywhere else, believed they descended from the ancient Egyptians. This was the once unchangeable article of faith that had been handed down from generation to generation since long before they had arrived in Europe. In the 1960's, however, a number of anthropologists claimed they came from India, and supported this by arguments based on physical characteristics, language, and on what was known about the history of their migrations. Moreover, there is a people in North India so similar to the gypsies that they must surely belong to the same race. The gypsies were accordingly convinced, and since then have agreed that they must have come from India.
Several years ago, I noticed in the Egyptian Hall of the British Museum of London some bas-reliefs on the wall of the tomb of Urinenptah, a priestly official of the Sun Temple who had lived at the time of the Old Kingdom, c. 2400 B.C. They show scenes from daily life, arranged in horizontal panels rahter in the style of a comic strip, and two represent a fiesta in his palace. In the lower panel, four women in long dresses, and with arms arched above their heads, dance. To their right, two young men, standing very straight, clap out the rhythm. The upper panel shows, sitting behind the dancers, a blind harpist, tow singers and a flautist. Apart from the flautist, it would need few alterations for this scene to depict a flamenco tablao of today. IN fact, even the flautist need not be eliminated, for in recent years some 'progressive' flamenco groups have taken to adding a flauta and a tambor (a kind of bongop drum) to the guitar when accompanying the faster cantes and bailes.
In his book, Los Gitanos, el flamenco y los flamencos, Rafael Lafuente wrote in 1955 that the historical truth about the gypsies is to be found in their own vague tradition, now generally discredited. He believes they are descended from the six thousand Egyptians taken prisoner when the Persian King Cambyses defeated the last Egyptian Pharoah in 525 B.C. It is possible that, perhaps after the conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great in 330 B.C., their descendents, freed from slavery, moved into India where, thoroughly "indianized", they began their westward migrations 700 years later, arriving in Armenia, as we know from the oldest written record of them extant, in the sixth century A.D."
interesting.... but given that flamenco has only really come into being in the last couple of hundred years, and that it came into being in Spain, not that important really where they came from before that....
|
|
|
|
