A'isha is my 35th great grandmother. But check this out: https://www.geni.com/list/ancestors/6000000022884910816#4. Her grandfather was Syrian, and her grandmother was either Syrian or half Syrian/half Saudi Arabian (two possible sets of parents are given because they're not sure which are correct). At any rate they appear to have married in Saudi Arabia and then to have gone to Egypt as A'isha's father was born & died in Egypt. These people got around! But it makes sense given the history of these regions which (including Spain) were all part of the Islamic Caliphate (622–750) at the time, and of course the nobles everywhere intermarried outside their culture, and sometimes their religion as well, for political alliance because that was the only way for them to assure their own survival into the future. Here's a map of the Islamic Caliphate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age#/media/File:Map_of...
I never imagined that I had North African or Middle Eastern blood until I got my genes tested and saw my ancestry report on 23andme.com; they group those two regions together because they are racially related and about 1% of my genes are from those regions. When I started tracing back my maternal great grandmother's lines here on Geni it began to make sense.
I have a different ancestral line that goes back to Egypt via Byzantium (present-day Istanbul in Turkey, part of the Roman Empire and later the Greek Byzantine Empire). From Egypt those lines trace back to North African Berbers (nomadic tribes) from Mauritania (Atlantic Coast of the Sahara) and what is now Algeria. At this time in the early centuries A.D./A.C.E. the Egyptian Pharaohs were actually Macedonian Greeks, and they are the ones who built the famed Library of Alexandria when Alexandria was the center of culture and knowledge in the Western world. These Macedonian Pharoahs included Cleopatra, but actually various Cleopatras because this was a title (the famous one who married the Roman Marc Antony was Cleopatra VII). Two of my great grandmothers via this line were Egyptian harem girls who had children with these Greek Pharaohs; those children were considered legitimate, enough at least to be married to Byzantine nobles.
That earlier line to Egypt is also via Spain. I have several lines that go from England to France back to Spain, and from there they lead to Carthage (North Africa), Rome, Silicia (present day Turkey) and Armenia and from there back to a long line of Jewish rabbis and exilarchs, Arabs, Persians etc. One line goes through Armenia to Afghanistan to India.
I also have a great grandmother who was an Ethiopian princess who married a Greek Byzantine emperor. Ethiopia was also Coptic Christian (Greek Orthodox), so it makes sense in that light. Just one more marriage of convenience so the nobles had a better chance of maintaining control of their realms.
It's all a little mind-bending! But fascinating too, and what a history lesson...
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