Arch Hades
08-26-2014, 03:51 AM
And by non "North AFrican/Near Eastern/African" i mean by migrations of peoples coming in to Sicily around or after the time of classical Greece. So this isnt a thread to desperately attempt to associate them with modern Scandinavian populations or Whitewash them. They are what they are. Just that there are a lot of myths about them that I think should be addressed.
A comprehensive study on Sicilian Y Chromosomes taken from 9 different regions of the island attributed Sicilians to be 37% Greek and only 6% North AFrican/Near Eastern.
"The presence or absence of genetic heterogeneity in Sicily has long been debated. Through the analysis of the variation of Y-chromosome lineages, using the combination of haplogroups and short tandem repeats from several areas of Sicily, we show that traces of genetic flows occurred in the island, due to ancient Greek colonization and to northern African contributions, are still visible on the basis of the distribution of some lineages. The genetic contribution of Greek chromosomes to the Sicilian gene pool is estimated to be about 37% whereas the contribution of North African populations is estimated to be around 6%.
In particular, the presence of a modal haplotype coming from the southern Balkan Peninsula and of its one-step derivates associated to E3b1a2-V13, supports a common genetic heritage between Sicilians and Greeks. The estimate of Time to Most Recent Common Ancestor is about 2380 years before present, which broadly agrees with the archaeological traces of the Greek classic era. The Eastern and Western part of Sicily appear to be significantly different by the chi2-analysis, although the extent of such differentiation is not very high according to an analysis of molecular variance. The presence of a high number of different haplogroups in the island makes its gene diversity to reach about 0.9. The general heterogeneous composition of haplogroups in our Sicilian data is similar to the patterns observed in other major islands of the Mediterranean, reflecting the complex histories of settlements in Sicily."
SOURCE : Piazza, A, G*****ini, Matullo et al. (January 2009), "Differential Greek and northern African migrations to Sicily are supported by genetic evidence from the Y chromosome", European Journal of Human Genetics 17 (1): 91--9.
LINK (Piazza, A, G*****ini, Matullo et al. (January 2009), "Differential Greek and northern African migrations to Sicily are supported by genetic evidence from the Y chromosome", European Journal of Human Genetics 17 (1): 91--9. Link - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2985948/)
Another study, although with less samples estimate Sicilians to be 7.5% paternally North AFrican/Saracen Arab. And all regions of Southern Italy were lower than that, ranging from 6.5 to 2%.
"To investigate the male genetic legacy of the Arab rule in southern Europe during medieval times, we focused on specific Northwest African haplogroups and identified evolutionary close STR-defined haplotypes in Iberia, Sicily and the Italian peninsula. Our results point to a higher recent Northwest African contribution in Iberia and Sicily in agreement with historical data. southern Italian regions known to have experienced long-term Arab presence also show an enrichment of Northwest African types. The forensic and genomic implications of these findings are discussed."
http://i1067.photobucket.com/albums/u431/ArchHades/Genetic%20maps%20and%20distance%20tables/NorthAfricanNearEasternYChromosomesinSouthernEurop e.jpg
SOURCE : Moors and Saracens in Europe, estimating the medieval North African male legacy in southern Europe European Journal of Human Genetics (2009) 17, 848–852; doi:10.1038/ejhg.2008.258; published online 21 January 2009
Link (http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v17/n6/full/ejhg2008258a.html)
So you have to basically cut these numbers in half to get full admixture estimates since they address the male side...So we're looking at 3-4% total since conquest is always done by males and i've never seen any evidence for significant North African/Arab maternal influence in Sicily.
And as far as the Roman slave trade here's a source that offers a comprehensive rebuttal to the idea that Italy was fulled with tons of oriental slaves. The result was that in the Near East they were mostly of Greek and other Southern European background, and only made up ~5% of the population of Rome (probably much less in other cities and nonexistent in the countryside). Not 40% as some high end estimates from early 20th century classicist suggested. And DNA evidence from modern Italians which is obviously most important backs this up too.
"However, one piece of negative evidence, to which Scheidel has also drawn attention, provides an intriguing hint that conventional estimates of slaves making up as much as 40 percent of Italy's population by the late first century B.C. may be far too high. An analysis of the genetic makeup of Italy's modern population argues that the various distinctive genetic combinations currently found in different regions within the peninsula by and large track the linguistic distribution that resulted from the migrations of the Iron Age. No data indicate the subsequent large-scale infusion of new genetic material into the populations of these regions except in the case of southern Italy and eastern Sicily, which is explained by the well-documented Greek migrations there. If this finding is correct, then the slave population of Italy even at its greatest extent must have been far smaller than Brunt imagined, perhaps no more than a million. Otherwise, one must suppose that a very large number of slaves existed but made no contribution to the peninsula's genetic composition because they simply failed to reproduce themselves. Yet a very large number of slaves, on the order of 3 million, presupposes that this population was fairly successful at reproducing itself because it could never have reached that size in the first place and then maintained those numbers for centuries through imports alone. As already noted, the majority of new slaves brought into a servile population that was not reproducing itself completely would only have replaced old slaves who had died. But if a population of 3 million slaves, representing as much as 40 percent of Italy's inhabitants in the first century B.C., was successfully reproducing itself, it would surely have left its mark on the genetic makeup of contemporary Italians. That it did not argues strongly for a very low rate of natural reproduction among Italy's slaves, which in turn is difficult to reconcile with the hypothesis that the number of slaves ever grew large enough to comprise 40 percent of the Italian population."
SOURCE : Nathan Rosenstein. Rome at War: Farms, Families, and Death in the Middle Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
LINK (http://books.google.com/books?id=X_euxrtly3oC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false)
For further information about Roman slaver this LINK (http://books.google.com/books/about/Foreigners_at_Rome.html?id=cUloAAAAMAAJ)as well.
Population Size:
"Immigration was essential to Rome both demographically, to increase or at least maintain the size of the city's population, and socially, to provide skilled workers and soldiers. The slave trade met some of the requirements, but free immigrants were always needed. Provincials probably began to outnumber Italians among newcomers to Rome in the first centuries BC and AD. The third century AD, when all recruitment for the Praetorian Guard was done in the provinces, may have seen the numerical peak of Rome's foreign population. It is plausible to suppose that at least 5% of the city's inhabitants were born outside Italy in that period; the reality could be much greater."
Expulsions:
"Foreigners who did not have Roman citizenship were always liable to summary expulsion from the city, and by the fourth century the possession of citizenship was no longer protection against such treatment. Although there was a certain amount of xenophobia within the Roman literary class, expulsion was only used in certain circumstances: to deal with the actual or potential misdeeds or alleged bad influence of specific groups (which could be defined by nationality, religion or occupation), or to counteract the effect of food shortages by reducing the number of mouths to feed. Expulsions were probably not carried out very efficiently, and were always short-lived."
Mortality Rate:
"It is generally agreed that mortality was probably higher in Rome than elsewhere in the Roman world, because of insanitary living conditions and the risk of contagious diseases; diseases such as tuberculosis may have been endemic. Newcomers to [17th-18th c.] London were more susceptible to plague than natives were, and the same point has been made about the greater susceptibility of Rome's immigrants to plasmodium falciparum malaria. Tuberculosis might be particularly dangerous to the young adults who probably formed most of the immigrant population. [...] Slaves are likely to have suffered from higher mortality than the free population, and immigrant slaves would have been particularly vulnerable to diseases which were not prevalent in their homelands."
Birth Rate:
"It is also likely that the birth rate would have been lower at Rome than elsewhere. Many migrants coming to the city would already have spent some of their fertile years elsewhere, and the slave part of the population would have been less fertile than the rest. Free male citizen immigrants may have postponed marriage until they had access to the corn dole, which from the time of Augustus was only available to a restricted number of recipients. In London, for similar reasons, the natives were closer to reproducing themselves than migrants were, and the same would almost certainly have been true for Rome."
Asia Minor:
"Although literature emphasizes the significance of Asian slaves at Rome, inscriptions present a rather different picture. The large number of epitaphs in Greek, especially for people from the province of Asia, is consistent with the large number of recorded peregrini [foreigners] in suggesting that the migration of people of free status was particularly significant for this area. The evidence is, however, almost exclusively concerned with the Greek population of Asia Minor, and there is very little sign of people of non-Greek background coming to Rome except as slaves. This is consistent with the general predominance of the most romanized/hellenized section of their home society among free migrants to Rome."
Syria:
"However, most Syrians arrived at Rome through the workings of the slave trade. Syrus was a common slave name, although not necessarily given only to Syrians, since the association Syrian = slave seems to have been very widespread....
"Voluntary migration from Syria to Rome would probably have begun in the late Republic. Most of the evidence, however, is from the second century AD or later. There is a clear implication that some of the slaves and ex-slaves labelled Syrians in the literary sources were thoroughly imbued with Greek culture, whether their ancestry was Syrian, Greek or mixed. Solin (1983, 722) notes that Syrian immigrants in general tended to be of Greek descent or at least to be from the most hellenized part of Syrian society."
Egypt:
"Most references to Egyptians at Rome concern Alexandrians, apparently of Greek extraction, rather than 'indigenous' Egyptians. On the other hand, the stereotyped Roman image of Egyptians concentrated on the aspects of their behaviour perceived as most outlandish, particularly the worship of animal-gods, and largely ignored the Greek component of their culture. There seems to be something of a contradiction between image and reality which may be due at least in part to anti-Cleopatra propaganda and its legacy."
North Africa:
"North Africa contained some cities which were Greek, Libyan or Phoenician foundations, but many of the main population centres began as Roman colonies (notably the re-established Carthage) or military settlements. Ricci (1994b, 198) believes that the colonization programme of Julius Caesar and Augustus in North Africa also stimulated a population flow from there to Rome. The inhabitants of the area came from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds (Italian, Greek, Punic, Libyan, Berber, Jewish), but, as with other areas, it is likely to have been the most romanized/hellenized section of the population which provided most of the free migrants to Rome."
Jews:
The group which made the greatest effort to retain a separate identity was the Jews. In their religious and communal institutions, their use of separate catacombs, their epigraphic and liturgical use of Greek, and even their naming practices, they behaved differently from others and were able to pass on a Jewish identity, so that people whose ancestors had lived at Rome for generations and who were otherwise well integrated into Roman society were still identifiably Jewish."
A comprehensive study on Sicilian Y Chromosomes taken from 9 different regions of the island attributed Sicilians to be 37% Greek and only 6% North AFrican/Near Eastern.
"The presence or absence of genetic heterogeneity in Sicily has long been debated. Through the analysis of the variation of Y-chromosome lineages, using the combination of haplogroups and short tandem repeats from several areas of Sicily, we show that traces of genetic flows occurred in the island, due to ancient Greek colonization and to northern African contributions, are still visible on the basis of the distribution of some lineages. The genetic contribution of Greek chromosomes to the Sicilian gene pool is estimated to be about 37% whereas the contribution of North African populations is estimated to be around 6%.
In particular, the presence of a modal haplotype coming from the southern Balkan Peninsula and of its one-step derivates associated to E3b1a2-V13, supports a common genetic heritage between Sicilians and Greeks. The estimate of Time to Most Recent Common Ancestor is about 2380 years before present, which broadly agrees with the archaeological traces of the Greek classic era. The Eastern and Western part of Sicily appear to be significantly different by the chi2-analysis, although the extent of such differentiation is not very high according to an analysis of molecular variance. The presence of a high number of different haplogroups in the island makes its gene diversity to reach about 0.9. The general heterogeneous composition of haplogroups in our Sicilian data is similar to the patterns observed in other major islands of the Mediterranean, reflecting the complex histories of settlements in Sicily."
SOURCE : Piazza, A, G*****ini, Matullo et al. (January 2009), "Differential Greek and northern African migrations to Sicily are supported by genetic evidence from the Y chromosome", European Journal of Human Genetics 17 (1): 91--9.
LINK (Piazza, A, G*****ini, Matullo et al. (January 2009), "Differential Greek and northern African migrations to Sicily are supported by genetic evidence from the Y chromosome", European Journal of Human Genetics 17 (1): 91--9. Link - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2985948/)
Another study, although with less samples estimate Sicilians to be 7.5% paternally North AFrican/Saracen Arab. And all regions of Southern Italy were lower than that, ranging from 6.5 to 2%.
"To investigate the male genetic legacy of the Arab rule in southern Europe during medieval times, we focused on specific Northwest African haplogroups and identified evolutionary close STR-defined haplotypes in Iberia, Sicily and the Italian peninsula. Our results point to a higher recent Northwest African contribution in Iberia and Sicily in agreement with historical data. southern Italian regions known to have experienced long-term Arab presence also show an enrichment of Northwest African types. The forensic and genomic implications of these findings are discussed."
http://i1067.photobucket.com/albums/u431/ArchHades/Genetic%20maps%20and%20distance%20tables/NorthAfricanNearEasternYChromosomesinSouthernEurop e.jpg
SOURCE : Moors and Saracens in Europe, estimating the medieval North African male legacy in southern Europe European Journal of Human Genetics (2009) 17, 848–852; doi:10.1038/ejhg.2008.258; published online 21 January 2009
Link (http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v17/n6/full/ejhg2008258a.html)
So you have to basically cut these numbers in half to get full admixture estimates since they address the male side...So we're looking at 3-4% total since conquest is always done by males and i've never seen any evidence for significant North African/Arab maternal influence in Sicily.
And as far as the Roman slave trade here's a source that offers a comprehensive rebuttal to the idea that Italy was fulled with tons of oriental slaves. The result was that in the Near East they were mostly of Greek and other Southern European background, and only made up ~5% of the population of Rome (probably much less in other cities and nonexistent in the countryside). Not 40% as some high end estimates from early 20th century classicist suggested. And DNA evidence from modern Italians which is obviously most important backs this up too.
"However, one piece of negative evidence, to which Scheidel has also drawn attention, provides an intriguing hint that conventional estimates of slaves making up as much as 40 percent of Italy's population by the late first century B.C. may be far too high. An analysis of the genetic makeup of Italy's modern population argues that the various distinctive genetic combinations currently found in different regions within the peninsula by and large track the linguistic distribution that resulted from the migrations of the Iron Age. No data indicate the subsequent large-scale infusion of new genetic material into the populations of these regions except in the case of southern Italy and eastern Sicily, which is explained by the well-documented Greek migrations there. If this finding is correct, then the slave population of Italy even at its greatest extent must have been far smaller than Brunt imagined, perhaps no more than a million. Otherwise, one must suppose that a very large number of slaves existed but made no contribution to the peninsula's genetic composition because they simply failed to reproduce themselves. Yet a very large number of slaves, on the order of 3 million, presupposes that this population was fairly successful at reproducing itself because it could never have reached that size in the first place and then maintained those numbers for centuries through imports alone. As already noted, the majority of new slaves brought into a servile population that was not reproducing itself completely would only have replaced old slaves who had died. But if a population of 3 million slaves, representing as much as 40 percent of Italy's inhabitants in the first century B.C., was successfully reproducing itself, it would surely have left its mark on the genetic makeup of contemporary Italians. That it did not argues strongly for a very low rate of natural reproduction among Italy's slaves, which in turn is difficult to reconcile with the hypothesis that the number of slaves ever grew large enough to comprise 40 percent of the Italian population."
SOURCE : Nathan Rosenstein. Rome at War: Farms, Families, and Death in the Middle Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
LINK (http://books.google.com/books?id=X_euxrtly3oC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false)
For further information about Roman slaver this LINK (http://books.google.com/books/about/Foreigners_at_Rome.html?id=cUloAAAAMAAJ)as well.
Population Size:
"Immigration was essential to Rome both demographically, to increase or at least maintain the size of the city's population, and socially, to provide skilled workers and soldiers. The slave trade met some of the requirements, but free immigrants were always needed. Provincials probably began to outnumber Italians among newcomers to Rome in the first centuries BC and AD. The third century AD, when all recruitment for the Praetorian Guard was done in the provinces, may have seen the numerical peak of Rome's foreign population. It is plausible to suppose that at least 5% of the city's inhabitants were born outside Italy in that period; the reality could be much greater."
Expulsions:
"Foreigners who did not have Roman citizenship were always liable to summary expulsion from the city, and by the fourth century the possession of citizenship was no longer protection against such treatment. Although there was a certain amount of xenophobia within the Roman literary class, expulsion was only used in certain circumstances: to deal with the actual or potential misdeeds or alleged bad influence of specific groups (which could be defined by nationality, religion or occupation), or to counteract the effect of food shortages by reducing the number of mouths to feed. Expulsions were probably not carried out very efficiently, and were always short-lived."
Mortality Rate:
"It is generally agreed that mortality was probably higher in Rome than elsewhere in the Roman world, because of insanitary living conditions and the risk of contagious diseases; diseases such as tuberculosis may have been endemic. Newcomers to [17th-18th c.] London were more susceptible to plague than natives were, and the same point has been made about the greater susceptibility of Rome's immigrants to plasmodium falciparum malaria. Tuberculosis might be particularly dangerous to the young adults who probably formed most of the immigrant population. [...] Slaves are likely to have suffered from higher mortality than the free population, and immigrant slaves would have been particularly vulnerable to diseases which were not prevalent in their homelands."
Birth Rate:
"It is also likely that the birth rate would have been lower at Rome than elsewhere. Many migrants coming to the city would already have spent some of their fertile years elsewhere, and the slave part of the population would have been less fertile than the rest. Free male citizen immigrants may have postponed marriage until they had access to the corn dole, which from the time of Augustus was only available to a restricted number of recipients. In London, for similar reasons, the natives were closer to reproducing themselves than migrants were, and the same would almost certainly have been true for Rome."
Asia Minor:
"Although literature emphasizes the significance of Asian slaves at Rome, inscriptions present a rather different picture. The large number of epitaphs in Greek, especially for people from the province of Asia, is consistent with the large number of recorded peregrini [foreigners] in suggesting that the migration of people of free status was particularly significant for this area. The evidence is, however, almost exclusively concerned with the Greek population of Asia Minor, and there is very little sign of people of non-Greek background coming to Rome except as slaves. This is consistent with the general predominance of the most romanized/hellenized section of their home society among free migrants to Rome."
Syria:
"However, most Syrians arrived at Rome through the workings of the slave trade. Syrus was a common slave name, although not necessarily given only to Syrians, since the association Syrian = slave seems to have been very widespread....
"Voluntary migration from Syria to Rome would probably have begun in the late Republic. Most of the evidence, however, is from the second century AD or later. There is a clear implication that some of the slaves and ex-slaves labelled Syrians in the literary sources were thoroughly imbued with Greek culture, whether their ancestry was Syrian, Greek or mixed. Solin (1983, 722) notes that Syrian immigrants in general tended to be of Greek descent or at least to be from the most hellenized part of Syrian society."
Egypt:
"Most references to Egyptians at Rome concern Alexandrians, apparently of Greek extraction, rather than 'indigenous' Egyptians. On the other hand, the stereotyped Roman image of Egyptians concentrated on the aspects of their behaviour perceived as most outlandish, particularly the worship of animal-gods, and largely ignored the Greek component of their culture. There seems to be something of a contradiction between image and reality which may be due at least in part to anti-Cleopatra propaganda and its legacy."
North Africa:
"North Africa contained some cities which were Greek, Libyan or Phoenician foundations, but many of the main population centres began as Roman colonies (notably the re-established Carthage) or military settlements. Ricci (1994b, 198) believes that the colonization programme of Julius Caesar and Augustus in North Africa also stimulated a population flow from there to Rome. The inhabitants of the area came from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds (Italian, Greek, Punic, Libyan, Berber, Jewish), but, as with other areas, it is likely to have been the most romanized/hellenized section of the population which provided most of the free migrants to Rome."
Jews:
The group which made the greatest effort to retain a separate identity was the Jews. In their religious and communal institutions, their use of separate catacombs, their epigraphic and liturgical use of Greek, and even their naming practices, they behaved differently from others and were able to pass on a Jewish identity, so that people whose ancestors had lived at Rome for generations and who were otherwise well integrated into Roman society were still identifiably Jewish."