heir dead in remote hill corners,
or burned them, they denied it, and declared they were good Mahometans,
and as such buried their dead in Mahometan cemeteries." (This
corresponds to their custom in Great Britain in the past generation, and
the earnestness which they display at present to secure regular burial
like Christians.) "But as their instruction is even more neglected than
that of the Bedouins, their religious information is so limited that one
may say of them, they have either no religion at all, or the simplest of
all. As to wine, they are less strict than most Mahometans. They
assured me that in Egypt there were many _Nury_."

The same writer obtained from one of these Syrian-Egyptian Gipsies a not
inconsiderable vocabulary of their language, and says: "I find many
Arabic, Turkish, and some Greek words in it; it appears to me, however,
that they have borrowed from a fourth language, which was perhaps their
mother-tongue, but which I cannot name, wanting dictionaries." The words
which he gives appear to me to consist of Egyptian-Arabic, with its usual
admixture from other sources, simply made into a gibberish, and sometimes
with one word substituted for another to hide the meaning--the whole
probably obtained through a dragoman, as is seen, for instance, when he
gives the word _nisnaszeha_, a fox, and states that it is of unknown
origin. The truth is, _nisnas_ means a monkey, and, like most of
Seetzen's "Nuri" words, is inflected with an _a_ final, as if one should
say "monkeyo." I have no doubt the Nauar may talk such a jargon; but I
should not be astonished, either, if the Shekh who for a small pecuniary
consideration eagerly aided Seetzen to note it down, had "sold" him with
what certainly would appear to any Egyptian to be the real babble of the
nursery. There are a very few Rommany words in this vocabulary, but then
it should be remembered that there are some Arabic words in Rommany.

The street-cry of the Gipsy women in Cairo is [ARABIC TEXT which cannot
be reproduced] "_Neduqq wanetahir_!" "We tattoo and circumcise!" a
phrase which sufficiently indicates their calling. In the "Deutscher
Dragoman" of Dr Philip Wolff, Leipzig, 1867, I find the following under
the word Zigeuner:--

"Gipsy--in Egypt, Gagri" (pronounced more nearly 'Rh'agri), "plural
_Gagar_; in Syria, _Newari_, plural _Nawar_. When they go about with
monkeys, they are called _Kurudati_, from _kird_, ape. The Gipsies of
Upper E