The natives of Dirin

In May of 57 anno taeiorum, Mu'âwiya's anno legis fidelorum and our AD 676, the Nestorians convened a synod at Dirin. This was on the southwest coast of the Gulf, no longer a Persian Gulf. It is also called Darai.

But that this place was chosen, in the waning days of Mu'âwiya's amirate even if accepting his calendar, shows it was not yet altogether an Islamic Gulf, either. Mu'âwiya considered his age one of "Believers"... but based his state's Belief upon Saint John the Forerunner, as a Damascene. Heir-apparent Yazîd may even have flirted with Christianity, in its Dyothelete form against Constantine IV (before the Emperor'd convene his own synod). Nestorians, as Christians, refused Mu'âwiya's watered-down Belief, treating this age as like that of the Seleucides, a saecular age "of Tayyaye". At Dirin they used no Arabic, instead sticking with Edessene-origin Nestorian Syriac.

So who were these Aramaean-speaking Christians of the Gulf, loyal to Arab amirs but not yet swamped by Arab Muslims? Jessica of the Saracenarum points to the Bahrayn's genetics, for the "Tylos" era. Being an island in the Gulf it got humid over there as well as hot; so it is a near-miracle they could get any DNA at all out of these samples.

At Bahrayn the "Tylos" ends at AD 600. I understand the southwestern Gulf as Aniranian but still secure for the Eranshahr: indeed, a Parsic-controlled bay. Khusro II did however oust the Nasrids from Lakhm of the lower Euphrates; so, down the Semites' side of the Gulf, refugees are possible. Still: for the seventh-century Gulf, I demand specifics of demic switchovers before I assume them. I suspect that Qatar was already Arab Muslim before anno Hagarae 57; hence the Khuzestan Chronicler had found Islamic sympathisers. But I am not seeing this at Dirin. Tylos-Bahrayn can be a proxy for Nestorian Dirin.

The ancient samples show ancestry linked with "Iraq and the Levant". That, to me, means Euphratean - these were Aramaic Semites, not Arabs who simply spoke Aramaic for official purposes (as spoke, the Nabatis of yore).

The results find three instances of the G6PD gene. This had a Mediterranean origin, 4k-3kBC. It protects against malaria. In the modern Gulf, Emiratis have inherited the most of these. Most parsimonious is that the gene had been injected into Iraq, rather than around the Yemen. I suspect Aramaeised Iraqis who brought G6PD to the Gulf. Mind: Iraq's climate isn't much better than the Gulf's.

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