Entwined African and Asian genetic roots of medieval peoples of the Swahili coast

[Nilotic]

Very informative read.

My reactionary, juvenile take is this:

The Tanzanians, Kenyans and Ugandans can keep Swahili; I no longer want anything to do with it.

 

[kaahin13]

I’ve heard rumors of Shanshi having Persian heritage for years. Also, recently on TikTok a lot of Banadiri people have been doing 23&me DNA tests and they overwhelming end up having South Asian and Persian heritage.

Why did those groups claim mostly Arab heritage when they’re in fact mixed with Pakistani/Indian and Persian?

shanshi come from a place called “ash shash” which was the Arabic word for Uzbekistan. not really Persians more like iranic peoples although Shirazi Persians did migrate in large numbers to the Swahili coast

 

[Hamzza]

Great find the shirazi narrative was also found on the somali coast and much of the architect said to be "arabian" is actually reminiscent of persian architect. One of the mosque in mogadishu if I remember correctly had the name khosrow inscribed on it and the somali clan of shanshi are originally from tashkent originally called shash.

In his Kitab al 'Ibar, Ibn Khaldun notes that the population of Shash or Chach (now Tashkent) in Central Asia was ordered to evacuate the town around 604 H/ 1207-1208 by the Khwarizmshah Qutb al-Din Muhammad II. Shach lay in the path of an invading force of Qara Khitay Turks. These may have been set in motion by the movements of Mongol armies beyond them. According to a variant reading in an Egyptian edition of Ibn Khaldun's text, these migrants, many of them skilled weavers and cap-makers, dispersed into the "lands of Islam ... to Cairo, Baghdad, and Mogadishu.”

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[Al hashimi]

Is it possible they have Somali TM40 dna but it says yemen

 

[kaahin13]

Is it possible they have Somali TM40 dna but it says yemen

You mean T-M70?

 

[Garaad diinle]

Yes I know about Barbaria being ruled by proto Somalis but Sarapion is shown yellow and thus part of Himyarite on this map. What does it mean. View attachment 263263

I’ve seen those Sabean inscriptions in northern Somali and found it very interesting. I’ve spoken about them on another thread. The Sabeans were truly hard working and adventurous business men. Their whole civilisation was build in trade.

also I realised that when the periplus was written in roughly 100 AD , Somalis who are under E-Y18629 were only roughly 700 years old. Meaning there numbers was still very very small. I wonder who occupied the entire “Barbaria” from Avalites to Opone. Also considering the fact that most Somali major Somali tribes claim origin in and around the Hararghe region like Dir/ Hawiye for example. It looks like there were other E-Z830 as well as E-Y18629 tribes who’s lineages died out and got replaced by modern Somali E-Y18629. T carriers also happen to have just arrived on the scene when the periplus was written.

If we were to examine the text of periplus there doesn't seem to be any mention of yemeni presence in sarapion.

What i find interesting is the name of raphta. Raphta could very well mean rabta in arabic which means a knot or bind and in the text it says that the city got it's name from sewing boats rhaptbn ploiarion. The ploiarion part means ship and the rhaptbn part means bind or sewn and in arabic it would be ربط.

If we further speculate say the name azania we find the following the ia part of azania is probably a greek suffix indicating land as in somali a person and somalia the land. The original name being azan now compare this with a-zinj the arabic name for the same area. Furthermore the arabs translated the name azania in plinys book to a-zinj. They even translate aromata in somalia as الطيب.

 

[Hamzza]

Great find the shirazi narrative was also found on the somali coast and much of the architect said to be "arabian" is actually reminiscent of persian architect. One of the mosque in mogadishu if i remember correctly had the name khosrow inscribed on it and the somali clan of shanshi are originally from tashkent originally called shash.

This is what the Hawiye oral traditions collected by Cerulli said about the Shirazi:

The Shirazi were the first to settle in Mogadishu. We don't know where they came from. Their face was white. They brought to the country their costume of cutting the first part of the hair from the young girls. The people didn't do that to their girls before them. This shirazi stayed a long time in Mogadishu. Then a famine struck the country. All the Širâši who were there were killed by this hunger. Still in the houses of the Rer Sheikh Mumin, you will find an inscription written in the time of the Širaši. Their language and their characters are not something that can be understood, But we had in tradition from the ancestors that the Shiraz inscription in the house of Rer Sheikh Mumin said in our language: "if we had found [to buy] a sheep's head for a tallere, the famine would not destroy us ".

 

[Al hashimi]

You mean T-M70?

Yh

 

[kaahin13]

Yh

It’s probably not Arab because it’s not really found in Arabia even though that area is highly sampled. People assume Yemenis were the only ones sailing to Somali ports when the Hellenistic world was very familiar with our region. If I had to guess that lineage is probably Egyptian/Sudanese.

 

[Angelina]

This is what the Hawiye oral traditions collected by Cerulli said about the Shirazi:

Can you send me the link of the book please. I want to read it.

 

[Hamzza]

Can you send me the link of the book please. I want to read it.

http://hdl.handle.net/2307/948

 

[Angelina]

http://hdl.handle.net/2307/948

No English translation?

 

[JackieBurkhart]

No English translation?

I don't know why he keeps peddling the myth that Asians settled Mogadishu before us. I read several threads on this and he's been debunked several times, and proven wrong. Ignore him.

@Shimbiris, come collect this ana-Arab Hamzza.

 

[Hamzza]

No English translation?

It's written in Af Soomaali as well as Italian

Unfortunately, no one has translated Cerulli's works to English. I use Google translate to translate snippets of the book.

 

[The alchemist]

The peer reviewers didn't take all that well to the authors' postcolonial crusade in the intro portion of the preprint.

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The peer reviewers bullied the authors into omitting “autochthonous development of coastal settlement” used in the preprint. Instead they final publication they emphasized their mixed heritage.

The authors approach the project with the intention to disprove the "racist" colonial Eurocentric analysis, despite their very own research proving otherwise

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Ancient DNA and all the related fields, archeology, and anthropology, were a mistake, error creation is a feature of the path. It can, by default, never explain the whole picture, only feed into biases that took shape through data constraint interpretive field of variables of uncertainty spaces. I still love to do it, but I think honestly, none of us, including the egg-heads know much of what that we're talking about. There is a strange level of arrogance in researching the past. I can't blame them to go full post-colonial (that doesn't mean things are right). The field is embarrassed by its history and what it has brought about. There is a reason why a new obsession with ethics has come to light and is put at the forefront, some of which I heard, can create new problems in putting hurdles to new future research.

An honest take is to say that autochthonous was not a needed comment. There is no absolute way of knowing what is autochthonous from a cultural standpoint into a unique formation of a social and traditional lifeway that came about through interactions of peoples informed through ancient DNA. It's not in the realm of geneticists. And the peer-review egg-heads have really no right to claim that it isn't autochthonous either.

 

[Garaad diinle]

I don't know why he keeps peddling the myth that Asians settled Mogadishu before us. I read several threads on this and he's been debunked several times, and proven wrong. Ignore him.

@Shimbiris, come collect this ana-Arab Hamzza.

There are many stories about how mogadishu was founded and the shirazi is simply one of them. I once read that the locals said that the city was founded by madigan which is a dir clan. Shirazis came after islam and the city or the area was inhabited long before that at least as far back as the periplus.

 

[Step a side]

It’s probably not Arab because it’s not really found in Arabia even though that area is highly sampled. People assume Yemenis were the only ones sailing to Somali ports when the Hellenistic world was very familiar with our region. If I had to guess that lineage is probably Egyptian/Sudanese.

There is a new study soon coming out and it contains an ancient sample from the Bronze Age in Khaybar (saudi arabia) >> Y haplogroup T.

 

[Hamzza]

AThere are many stories about how mogadishu was founded and the shirazi is simply one of them. I once read that the locals said that the city was founded by madigan which is a dir clan. Shirazis came after islam and the city or the area was inhabited long before that at least as far back as the periplus.

In the same source, Hawiye said Madigan come to Mogadishu immediately after the Shirazi.

 

[The alchemist]

This is what the Hawiye oral traditions collected by Cerulli said about the Shirazi:

The custom of cutting parts of the children's hair was not a "Shirazi" introduction. It was a chief ancient Cushitic practice and extended to East Sahelian non-Cushitic peoples, that likely got it from Cushites. More like random Hawiyes guessing and making up stuff instead of it being an oral tradition and Cerulli leaning on those fabrications.

I have read mentions of old, now conveniently gone fragments of structures made by supposedly Iranian-speaking peoples that today cannot seem to exist anywhere near the southern coast. I think it is worth an investigation on archeological grounds, and conceivably more evidence of foreign contact will be uncovered in the context of the ancient trade, things we know took place.

One needs evidence and firm multi-modal substantiation for extending influence from southeast Africa to the southern Somali coast. If southern Somali contact with Iranian types happened, which I have no issue with (besides the weird affinity to state that West/Central Asians came to the coast first), it would likely be a separate thing from the Swahilis until that is disproven by facts on the ground.

 

[The alchemist]

A run I quickly made from the cluster-based averages of the samples from the study: