Shirazi

There are a few articles discussing the Shirazi of east-Africa. As with the migration-theory of the Anglo-Saxons, with the Kurgan hypothesis for Indo-European irruptions further into Europe, and with the Aryan hypothesis for same into northwest India: original claim to origins, claim dismissed by 20th century academics, original claim validated by genetics.

Shiraz is in Iran and is famed for a wine they pioneered. Our Shirazis are an East African group who used to rule Kilwa as "sultans", a classic Syro-Arabic term. But Kilwa claimed not to be Arabs, but to be Persian - both in Arabic and in Portuguese, circa AD 1500. The synopsis hints at a native source from AD 1300, possibly Arabic but we really cannot discount Persian. The researchers wanted to test that claim (and its detractors) through DNA-testing. The best-preserved bodily remains as elsewhere are in graves, elite graves at that.

The chart from the paper - so, the burials - would start around AD 1200; the Arabic chronicle would have the sultanate founded around AD 1000. There is also coinage; this starts from the eleventh century (suggesting a sultanate based then, perhaps, from Somalia). In the main burials the "Persian" side also has some Indic. The other half of this ancestry is consistently Makwasinyi. As to drift before the grave thus-far first exhumed, the mixing had started around AD 1000; the chronicle is, thereby, vindicated.

I'll interject that this is well over a century after the Zanj rebellion; these sultans did not supply the 'Abbasids, much less the Sasanids.

The male lineage tells a subtly different story:

Analysing male-transmitted Y chromosome DNA, we find that two out of three non-first-degree related males from Manda carry haplogroup J2, and the third carries G2. Both haplogroups are characteristic of Southwest Asia (plausibly Persia) and are largely absent in sub-Saharan Africans. The Kilwa individual also carries J2. Fourteen out of 19 males from Mtwapa have Y chromosome haplogroups in the J family, and two are of the R1a haplogroup, all considered typically non-African. Only 3 out of 19 Mtwapa males, along with the Faza male, are in the E1 family characteristic of sub-Saharan Africa.

I admit to unfamiliarity with G2. J2, by contrast, I know: it is Semitic, northwest-Semitic at that. Mtwapa's R1a is Aryan...

. . . but uncommon in East Africa. This is telling me of high aristocratic disdain for trade, what Hindus would scorn as a vaisya job. Some Iranian nobles might be grasping enough to do it. But as we see here - not many. Mostly they let G2 and J2 do it, at least J2 being native speakers of Syriac and perhaps picking up some Yemeni and Somali languages.

But I must count out Iraqis, and Arabs and Yemenis, and Somalis. Even Jews seem hard-to-square, unless they are Elamite Jews. The paper is able to tell all these from Persians. In the Y-DNA, instead I'm seeing the Khuzistan and the southern Iranian coast, by now thoroughly Iranian (if not inhabiting palaces), and not (yet?) an "Arabestan". In the timing (and the Indic presence) I'm seeing the Ghaznavis. That aristocracy was Turco-Persian.

G2 and J2 were still not getting palaces in Iran. It looks like these post-Iranians found their palaces further south.

I doubt that all this intercourse was an export of males into Africa. One avenue for future-research, I suggest, would be to check the hither side of this commerce: the southern Baluchestan and maybe Seistan and the Indus delta. Would there be maternal African DNA? preserved African foodstuffs or textiles? pottery?