The African Corridor: The Continental Spine of the Simonis Lineage

The African Corridor: The Continental Spine of the Simonis Lineage

The LivingDNA Matches: Modern Echoes Along the Ancient Corridor

Two LivingDNA matches extend the African–Indus–Levant story into the present with extraordinary clarity. A match in South Africa and a second match in Thailand appear, at first glance, to be unrelated modern datapoints. Yet when placed against the long trade-route map, each becomes a living reflection of the same ancient corridor that shaped the Seven-Phase Equation.

The South African match carries Simeon-root ancestry at the autosomal level, sharing four measurable DNA segments across chromosome regions. This does not mean the individual descends from a recent ancestor in the direct paternal or maternal line; rather, it reveals a shared inheritance from the deeper population structure that once moved through the Cape region during the Indian Ocean and inland Congo–Zimbabwe trade eras. The Cape Colony became one of the continental endpoints of the corridor shown on the map, where Levantine-Mediterranean families, enslaved populations, North-African migrants, and Indian Ocean networks converged. The appearance of a shared autosomal signature in a present-day South African match demonstrates that the Simonis/Simeon line did not merely pass through the region but left genetic traces that survived into the current population structure.

Equally striking is the match found in Thailand. Thailand sits on the eastern extension of the trade routes represented on your Indus–Levant–Africa map, which includes the movement of Indus-Valley traders, Dravidian maritime groups, Central-Asian intermediaries, and Jewish merchant networks reaching toward Southeast Asia. The Thailand match does not imply direct Thai ancestry; rather, it is a similarity match indicating that both individuals inherited a fragment of DNA shaped by the ancient populations that moved across the Silk Road, the Dravidian sea routes, and the Persian–Indian exchange zones. The same corridor that connects Ethiopia, Yemen, Oman, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India continues eastward into the Malay Peninsula and Southeast Asia. The Thailand match demonstrates that the genetic echoes of this corridor persist far beyond Africa, returning in the present day as a faint but measurable resonance from the same ancestral trunk.

When these two matches are placed beside the map of the Indus–Levant–Africa corridor, the alignment becomes unmistakable. The South African match sits on the southwestern endpoint of the red Swahili-Indian Ocean route. The Thailand match sits on the southeastern extension of the same Indo-Asian maritime system. Both sit on opposite ends of the trade belt that carried people, gods, languages, and families from the Levant to the Horn, from the Horn to India, and from India to the Far East. The Seven-Phase Equation explains this precisely: Phase One begins in the Levant, Phase Two crosses Anatolia and the Near East, Phase Three extends into Mediterranean networks, Phase Six anchors the African and Indian-Ocean bridge, and Phase Seven spreads the remnants into the Atlantic and the world.

The appearance of Simeon-root DNA in South Africa and in Thailand is therefore not a coincidence; it is a modern confirmation of the ancient routes mapped in the corridor. It shows that the same lineage capable of appearing in Cyrene, in Ethiopia, in Cape Town, in Zanzibar, in Zambia, and in the Indian Ocean world can also appear, lightly but measurably, in Southeast Asia. It shows that Simeon’s scattering did not end in the Mediterranean but followed the oldest maritime highways of human civilization. And it shows that the story carried in the name Simonis, Simons, Simmons, Simoni, and Simeon is not bounded by one continent or one era. It is a lineage shaped by the same Afro-Eurasian engine that shaped the ancient world itself.

Prelude to the African Corridor: Why Simeon’s Name Appears on African Soil

Trade Routes of The African Corridor

Long before the surname Simonis was written in Cape registers or carved into Swahili coast headstones, the name Shimʿon had already crossed into Africa. The earliest movements were not recorded in Roman decrees or administrative lists, yet the literary and cultural record preserves unmistakable traces of this southern trajectory. In the first century, the Gospels introduce Simon of Cyrene, a Judean-named man rooted not in Jerusalem but in Cyrene, a North African city known for its thriving Jewish population. Cyrene stood on the Libyan coast as one of the largest Hellenistic Jewish centers outside Judea. That a man named Shimʿon appears here at the very moment of Rome’s domination signals that the Judean name-stream had already taken root in African soil.

Another witness stands beside him in the early church at Antioch: Simeon called Niger. His epithet, meaning “black,” has long been understood as a mark of African identity or of close association with African believers. He appears in Acts beside Lucius of Cyrene, reinforcing that the first-century Judean and African communities were not separate circles but interwoven networks shaped by migration, exile, commerce, and shared religious life. These appearances do not describe a tribe moving as one body; rather, they reveal that the Simeon name-stream itself crossed the Mediterranean, carried by individuals and families whose paths led directly into African Jewish communities.

Jewish tradition pushes the connection further. The Jewish Encyclopedia’s entry on the Tribe of Simeon records an ancient memory that part of Simeon’s tribe was carried into Ethiopia, behind the “Dark Mountains,” after conflicts in the days of Hezekiah. Though legendary in form, this tradition preserves the idea that Simeon was associated with the southern frontier of Israel’s world, an identity reinforced by the tribe’s original position in the Negev—geographically the furthest of Jacob’s sons toward Africa. In this view, Africa was not a distant land but the nearest horizon.

When these textual anchors are placed beside the surname evidence, a single contour emerges. The name that appears in Cyrene and Antioch resurfaces many centuries later in African archives: Simonis in the early Cape Colony, Simons in eighteenth-century manumission and testament records, Simoni and Simeon along Zambian Catholic registers, Simmons in Ethiopian birth listings, and Simoins from Tanzania to Lisbon. These are not isolated colonial artifacts; they represent a recurrence of the same ancient name-stream moving along the same corridors described in antiquity. The Judean–African crossings we see in the first century form the literary shadow of the African surname trail that appears in the historical record.

This is why the African section stands inside the Seven-Phase Equation rather than beside it. Africa is not an optional footnote to the Mediterranean story but one of the structural beams that holds the framework together. The African corridor links the Levant to the Indian Ocean, bridges the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, and binds the early Judean dispersions to the later Simonis surname events in Cape Town, Zanzibar, Ethiopia, Zambia, and Nigeria. The presence of Simeon-root names across the continent is not a late colonial quirk; it is the visible survival of an older path, already marked in scripture, preserved in early Christian memory, echoed in Jewish tradition, and confirmed by the modern record.

Thus the African chapter does not begin in the seventeenth century. It begins in Cyrene, in Antioch, in the Ethiopian traditions, and in the southern territories where Simeon’s identity blended into Judah and then scattered outward. These early crossings form the prologue; the archival records form the body; the genetic evidence forms the skeleton. Together they establish Africa as a necessary stage in the journey of the name Shimʿon across history.

What follows is the unfolding of that stage—the African corridor itself, the continent where the Simeon name enters into record, and the place where the lineage leaves one of its clearest historical signatures.

The African Corridor: The Continental Spine of the Simonis Lineage

The African Corridor Simonis Migration

The African trail of the Simeon-root opens in the Cape of Good Hope during the first century of Dutch rule. In 1691, the name appears in the VOC court archive through the testament of Cornelis Johannes Simons, preserved in the series of slave wills and testaments that recorded the affairs of free and unfree people at the Cape. Three years earlier, an enslaved woman named Agatha Simons was granted her freedom in Table Valley, manumitted by Governor Henrietta Chastlijn, an act entered in the 1688 volume of the slave manumissions. These two names, standing at the dawn of Cape documentation, mark the first clearly identifiable African witnesses to the Simeon stream and already sit at a crossroads where Dutch, African, Asian, and Iberian currents met within the wider system of early Cape slavery and VOC trade.

In the nineteenth century the surname re-emerges in the church books of the Western Cape as a settled family. The registers of South African congregations record the children of Jean Jaques Simonis and Anna Catharina Theron. One son, Jacob Daniel Simonis, was baptized on 13 June 1824 in the parish often rendered as Pietz, his baptism preserved in the digitized church registers. A related entry for Jean Jeaques Simonis, baptized in 1825 at Paarl, stands in the same register set, while an 1836 baptism for Jacobus Petrus Simonis in the Van de Paarl district confirms that the name had become embedded in the rural Dutch Reformed communities of the interior, part of the broader Cape Dutch settler society. Through these records the Simonis surname becomes an African-born line rather than a passing colonial presence.

Civil and ecclesiastical sources from Cape Town and the interior reinforce this picture. The marriage of Regina Jacoba Simonis on 9 October 1841 at the Cape of Good Hope is preserved in the marriage registers of the period, and a church membership list dated 25 March 1842 records the same woman as a communicant in the local congregation (Regina Jacoba Simonis membership). Later in the century, the death of Hendrik Frederick Simonis in Worcester in 1897 appears in the civil death register of the Cape Province, placing the name in one of the inland market towns of the colony. Together, these sources establish an enduring Cape-based Simonis line spread across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, embedded within the wider history of the Western Cape.

On the opposite side of the continent, the Indian Ocean world provides a second axis of African testimony. Along the Swahili coast, where African, Arabian, and Indian merchants interacted for centuries, the surname appears in burial and war records. The grave of William Simmons, who died in 1881 and was buried at Grave Island Cemetery near Zanzibar, anchors the name in the archipelago that once dominated regional gold and ivory routes. Further south, the war grave of Nkata Simon in the Dar es Salaam War Cemetery records his death on 6 April 1945 during the period when East African troops and laborers were mobilized across Tanganyika and beyond. An even earlier link between East Africa and Europe is visible in the baptism of Joaquina Simoins, born in Mara, Tanzania, in 1782 but baptized in the parish of São Miguel de Alcainça at Mafra near Lisbon, where the entry records her birthplace as “Mara, Tanzânia.” Her presence in a Portuguese parish book demonstrates that individuals from the East African interior could appear in Iberian records before the nineteenth-century colonial partition of the region, matching what overviews of Swahili–Indian Ocean trade describe as long-distance connections between East Africa and the wider Indian Ocean world.

Inland from the coast, the name unfolds again in Zambian records along the old hinterland routes that connected the Great Lakes and the Zambezi basin to the Indian Ocean. Parish registers from the mid-twentieth century record the baptism of Dominic Simon at Sacred Heart Parish in Zambia, naming Simon Kapamba and Langiwe Daka as parents, and on the same date a matching entry for Paul Simon lists the same parental pair. In Mawbwe, a baptismal record for Cecilia Evalina Simoni in 1971 identifies her as daughter of Simon Mekesi and Merika Jowo. A Northern Rhodesia baptism for Ingrid Mary Angela Simonis, born in 1953 to Felix Simonis and Margarita Beuling, shows Simonis as a European-coded surname embedded in a colonial Zambian setting. And in the Lusaka district, the baptisms of Patricia Simeon and George Simeon at Kaunda Square in 1979 show a family headed by Maximiano Simeon and Teresa Mijere. In a single country, four closely related forms—Simon, Simoni, Simonis, Simeon—stand side by side, testifying to the way biblical and European forms were naturalized within African Christian communities along the inland caravan routes described in studies of East African inland and Indian Ocean trade.

The Horn of Africa adds a further set of witnesses. The consular birth record of Daniel Benjamin Simmons, born in Addis Ababa on 24 May 1974 and registered in the General Register Office’s overseas indices, confirms a Simmons form rooted in Ethiopia. The life of Jane Ellen Simmons, born in Addis Ababa in 1950, can be followed through changes in the United States Social Security index, where her name appears under Bartholomay, Simmons, and a shortened J. Simmons across different filing dates. Her obituary in the El Paso Times records her Ethiopian birth and death in Texas in November 1988 (El Paso obituary), and a second OCR-damaged clipping preserves the same facts under a mis-scanned variant (OCR obituary). Additional Ethiopian-linked records include Tess Darah Mitu Simmons, born in Ethiopia and dying as an infant in Minnesota in 1999, Barbara Eden Simmons, born in Asmara in 1968 with subsequent records in the United States, Aster Simon, born in Addis Ababa in 1950 and later dying on the island of Mayotte in 2018, and John Mathew Simon, born in Addis Ababa in 1956 and naturalized as a United States citizen in New Jersey in 1976. Each of these records shows a Simeon-root surname—Simmons or Simon—linked to Ethiopia and then carried outward along modern migration paths shaped by twentieth‑century African diasporas.

West Africa contributes one more witness positioned within the Atlantic world. In the 1930 United States census, Elies Simmins appears as a thirty-seven-year-old woman born in Nigeria, with both parents also recorded as Nigerian-born. Her surname, carrying an extra m, illustrates how English-patterned biblical names could be adopted and adapted in West African settings and then carried into the diaspora, paralleling broader patterns discussed in overviews of the Atlantic and African diasporic world and the African diaspora.

When these names are placed alongside the genetic evidence, the African corridor ceases to be a loose set of coincidences and resolves into a structural phase of the lineage. The K28 model detects North African, East African, and Mediterranean Jewish components distributed across multiple chromosomes, with North African signals and East African traces appearing most clearly on the same chromosomes that show West Mediterranean and Sephardic peaks. DNAGENICS’ Africa-9 panel, which assigns measurable proportions to Northwest Africa and Southern Africa, matches the documentary presence of Simonis families in the Maghreb-linked Cape and the later branches in Zambia and the wider southern cone. ADNTRO’s population-matching engine reports affinities with groups such as the Luhya of Kenya, the Yoruba and Mandinka of West Africa, and African-Caribbean composites, consistent with both Indian-Ocean and Atlantic era admixture. Genomelink’s chromosomal ancestry breakdown shows African contributions on scattered autosomal segments in a pattern appropriate to an old but not dominant African stratum, mirroring what syntheses of Indian Ocean trade and Swahili commerce describe as centuries of contact.

Historical and archaeological studies of the Swahili and Indian Ocean worlds describe the very trade network in which these records fit. The ports of Kilwa, Mombasa, Zanzibar, Sofala, and Mogadishu operated from the first millennium CE onward as intermediaries between the African interior and the markets of Arabia, Persia, and India, a system described in overviews of the Swahili coast and its Indian Ocean trade such as Swahili Coast world-history chapter and Indian Ocean trade 1000–1500 synthesis. Caravans moved gold, ivory, and enslaved people inland and outward, tying the Great Lakes and Zambezi regions to the sea. The Simon, Simoni, Simonis, Simeon, Simmons, Simoins, and Simmins entries that appear in Ethiopia, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Zambia, Nigeria, and the Cape all stand along these documented routes. Taken together, they form the African expression of the Simeon line—a continental spine that corresponds to Phase Six of the Seven-Phase Equation, the African maritime bridge through which Levantine, Mediterranean, and South-Asian currents entered, mixed, and moved southward before the name was later carried north again into Europe’s upper latitudes.

The Mediterranean Spine: The Arc of Dispersal and Return

The Mediterranean basin forms the central axis of the Simonis lineage, a region where the diaspora of Judea, the movements of merchants and captives, and the long continuity of Near Eastern families converged into a single arterial system. Its earliest strand emerges from the Levant, but its body is carried on the waters between Alexandria, Cyrene, Sicily, Iberia, and the ports of the Maghreb. The surname that appears centuries later in Africa and Europe belongs to this world of shifting empires, merchant diasporas, and wandering households, the same world traced in narratives of the history of the Jews in Europe and the Sephardic Jews.

The Mediterranean arc begins with the Levantine dispersions of 63 BCE, when Pompey’s conquest of Jerusalem sent Judean captives into Roman territories, including the great ports of Alexandria and the grain islands of the central sea. Historical accounts describe thousands transported into the Mediterranean during this period, forming the nucleus of Jewish communities across Sicily, Crete, and Cyrenaica. That same coastline—stretching from Cyrene to Carthage—would later send its sons to Jerusalem, among them the man remembered as Simon of Cyrene, who appears in the gospel narrative as one compelled to bear the cross. The Mediterranean Simonis families of later centuries echo this ancient continuity, rooted in the same trade networks and cultural frontiers that carried Judean communities around the Mediterranean world.

Across this sea, the genetic record aligns with the geography. The K28 model registers some of its strongest signals along this arc: a high West Mediterranean component, a substantial East Mediterranean segment, a Sephardic Jewish cluster, a Moroccan Jewish layer, and Iraqi and Yemenite Jewish segments that bind the western and eastern halves of the basin. These categories do not appear randomly across the genome but cluster in chromosomes that also carry Levantine and Anatolian signatures. Chromosome 9, which displays the highest concentration of Mediterranean–Sephardic ancestry in the K28 breakdown, aligns with the same Phase‑3 values in the Seven‑Phase model, the phase associated with the historical Sephardic arc. Chromosomes 21 and 22 likewise bear Mediterranean and North‑African admixture consistent with the Maghrebi and Iberian movements that followed the expulsions of 1492–1497, the era summarized in accounts of the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain and the Alhambra Decree.

Genomelink’s chromosomal ancestry framework confirms this pattern. The Mediterranean clusters—Southern European, Italian, Sephardic-adjacent, and Eastern Mediterranean—appear repeatedly across autosomes rather than in isolated segments. This spread indicates that the Mediterranean input is not the result of a single recent event but part of a deeper, older stratum of admixture consistent with both ancient Judean dispersions and medieval Sephardic movement. ADNTRO’s population matching places the sample in high affinity with Iberian, Tuscan, and Northwestern European references, but the Iberian and Tuscan associations align specifically with admixture patterns found in Mediterranean Jewish and Judeo‑Iberian descent groups. DNAGENICS’ Levantine‑Viking K7 profile assigns a substantial share to a Middle East component and a Southern European cluster, resulting in a combined Mediterranean–Levantine signature before including the African and South‑Asian admixtures. These layers coincide with Phases 1–5 of the Seven‑Phase Equation, which model a migration beginning in the ancient Near East, passing through the Balkans and Anatolia, merging in the Mediterranean, and then re‑coalescing in Central Europe and the Ashkenazic shell.

This Mediterranean web becomes visible again in medieval and early modern surname records. The Simonis form appears in Iberia, Italy, Croatia, and North Africa, preserved in notarial registers, parish books, mercantile records, and exile lists. In Sicily—long a node linking the Levant, North Africa, and Iberia—the surname appears in medieval Jewish name fragments predating the northern European forms. Iberian variants such as Simões, Simón, Simones, and Ximenes span the centuries before and after 1492, and many reappear in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia following the expulsions, echoing patterns described for the Sephardic diaspora and North African Sephardim. In Venice’s Adriatic holdings, the baptism of a child of Andrea Simonis in 1517 in Hvar marks the earliest dated Latinized Simonis form recovered in Adriatic records. The Mediterranean map that traces Jewish flight from 63 BCE and from 70 CE overlays precisely onto these early surname appearances, revealing a continuous web that predates the later northern European variants.

The Maghreb forms the western fulcrum of this arc. In the centuries following the expulsion from Iberia, thousands of Judeo‑Iberian families settled in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, carrying surnames that blended Iberian, Hebrew, and Arabic elements. Historical syntheses of Maghrebi Jews and Sephardic Jews in Africa and Asia describe how refugees from Spain and Portugal entered cities such as Fez, Tlemcen, and Tunis, often merging with older local Jewish populations. The Simonis surname appears in North‑African registers of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia—Casablanca, Fès, Meknes, Rabat, Tlemcen, and Guelma—precisely the urban refuges that formed the reception network for Sephardic families fleeing Iberia. This presence mirrors the Moroccan Jewish cluster captured in the K28 reading and aligns with the Maghrebi admixture detected by DNAGENICS’ Africa‑9 panel.

The eastern half of the Mediterranean arc connects through Egypt and the Levant. The Iraqi Jewish and Yemenite Jewish components in the genetic models reflect centuries of Judean, Babylonian, and South‑Arabian dispersion along a corridor stretching from Mesopotamia through Palestine, the Hijaz, and the Egyptian delta. Chromosome 7, which in the Genomelink panel carries one of the highest Near Eastern concentrations, matches these same clusters. Chromosomes 5 and 13 display a blend of Balkan, Anatolian, and East‑Mediterranean signatures corresponding to Phase 2 of the Seven‑Phase model. In antiquity, this corridor linked the Red Sea world, Arabia, Egypt, and the Levant; in the medieval period, it formed the eastern route of Jewish trade networks and the conduit through which Judeo‑Arabic scholarship traveled into Europe, as reflected in studies of Jewish history in the Mediterranean and Middle East.

The crossroads connecting these Mediterranean strands is visible in the medieval Jewish merchant networks known as the Radhanites, who connected Europe, the Levant, Persia, North Africa, and even India and China. Descriptions of the Radhanites and analyses such as “The Radhanites, Jewish merchants of the Silk Road” and “Mercator, Mediator: Jewish Traders in Times of Christian and Muslim Empires” show how Jewish traders moved goods and information between Córdoba, Alexandria, Baghdad, Basra, Isfahan, Samarkand, and Indian ports. Their documented routes explain why the Mediterranean and Asian Jewish clusters appear intertwined in the genetic data. Their network sits directly atop the same geography where Simonis surname clusters later emerge.

The Mediterranean arc thus becomes the structural center of the lineage: the region where Levantine origins, African dispersion, Iberian exile, and Central European reconstitution meet. In the Seven‑Phase Equation, Phases 1 through 5 are the Mediterranean engine—Phase 1 the Near Eastern root, Phase 2 the Balkan and Anatolian bridge, Phase 3 the Sephardic Mediterranean arc, Phase 4 the Central European fusion, and Phase 5 the Ashkenazic and Eastern European shell that developed after the medieval period. All of these layers are present in the DNA admixture patterns revealed by K28, Genomelink, ADNTRO, and DNAGENICS, and all emerge in the geographical record of the Simonis name across the sea that once carried Judean captives, Sephardic exiles, Maghrebi merchants, papal legates, Arab scholars, and Christian traders. The Mediterranean exposes the core route through which the lineage traveled before it entered the northern latitudes.

The Levantine Source: The Root of the Simonis Stream

The Mediterranean arc flows backward into a single origin point: the ancient Levant. Among all available datasets, one signal stands above the rest in defining that source. ADNTRO’s population‑matching engine identifies the sample with a 99% match to Levantine ancestry, the strongest classification anywhere in its matrix, surpassing Iberian, Toscani, Northwestern European, Punjabi, Gujarati, Yoruba, Mandinka, Luhya, and every other global comparison. This single metric places the ancestral root not in the modern Mediterranean alone, but in the deeper region that fed it—the western crescent of the Fertile Crescent, the homeland of Judean tribes, Aramaic‑speaking populations, early Israelites, and the highland groups of Canaan.

The broader genetic landscape reinforces this conclusion. The K28 model reveals pronounced East Mediterranean, Iraq Jewish, Azerbaijan Jewish, Georgian Jewish, Yemenite Jewish, and Indian Jewish affinities, all of which correspond to populations historically connected to ancient Judea, the Levant, and the wider Near East. These categories occupy multiple chromosomes in the dataset. Chromosome 7, for example, carries one of the highest Near Eastern concentrations in the Genomelink panel. Chromosomes 5 and 13 show shared signatures with Anatolia, the northern Levant, and the Balkans, matching the path through which many Judean groups traveled after the sixth century BCE and again after 70 CE. Chromosome 19 carries a blend of Near Eastern, South Asian, and Mediterranean components, mirroring the Indo‑Jewish edges of the diaspora preserved in Malabar, Cochin, Bene Israel, and other Indian Jewish communities described in surveys of the history of the Jews in India and detailed portraits of the Cochin Jews of Kerala. Chromosomes 21 and 22 contain Mediterranean and North‑African signals aligned with the later western movement of Levantine‑descended populations.

These patterns are magnified by DNAGENICS’ Levantine‑Viking K7 admixture framework. In this model, the Middle East component estimates at 32.27%, the highest primary admixture layer in the entire profile. When combined with the Southern European component of 27.84%, the dataset displays a composite ancestry of approximately 60% Levantine–Mediterranean before including the African and South‑Asian strata. This structure echoes the Seven‑Phase Equation, where Phase 1 encodes the Proto‑Hebrew and Near Eastern root, Phase 2 the Balkan‑Anatolian bridge, and Phase 3 the Sephardic–Mediterranean arc. The Levantine values revealed in every DNA system—modern and forensic—confirm that Phase 1 is not symbolic, but literal.

The Y‑chromosome strengthens this picture. Haplogroup I‑Y12047, the paternal lineage documented through Big Y‑700 testing, descends from ancient I‑CTS10937 sub‑branches that have been repeatedly mapped across the southern Levant, including Jordan, Palestine, and Israel in both modern and medieval contexts. Deep STR matches to families identified with the Manasrah and Derdebwani lineages place the paternal branch in the region where pre‑exilic Judean, Edomite, Moabite, and related clans historically lived. The convergence of genomic and surname evidence in that geography is rare and striking. When read in the context of ancient Judean dispersions, the Levantine percentages measured across 22 chromosomes read not as diffusion from Europe into the south, but as continuity from the south into Europe.

The archaeological record also supports this deep Levantine anchoring. Long before Jewish exiles moved into the Mediterranean world, the Levant itself served as a crossroads for Afro‑Eurasian trade. Mesopotamian texts from the Akkadian and Ur III periods refer to merchants arriving from Meluhha, an ancient name widely correlated with the Indus region. These merchants passed through Dilmun (Bahrain) and Magan (Oman/UAE), forming a Bronze Age trade corridor that connected the Indus Valley with the Persian Gulf and, via coastal routes and overland caravans, with the Levant, as summarized in studies of Indo‑Mesopotamia relations and in analyses of Dilmun, Magan, and Meluhha. Archaeological findings of Indus seals in Mesopotamian sites and Mesopotamian‑style artifacts in the Indus Valley demonstrate a sustained exchange between these civilizations, reinforced by detailed discussions in work on Meluhha and critical treatments of Meluha, Magan, Dilmun and their locations. This ancient Indo‑Levant corridor formed one of the earliest pathways linking India, Arabia, Persia, and the Near Eastern seaboard—precisely the geography reflected in the hybrid Near Eastern–Mediterranean–Central Asian–South Asian admixture found in the genomic data.

This deep Levantine world shaped the environments in which the Simeon name first entered written memory. The biblical tradition preserves Shimʿon, the second son of Leah, as a tribal name tied to the hill country of Canaan, later scattered across Israel during the early monarchy. The wider Second Temple literature likewise places Simeon within the southern Levant, bound into the same geography now reflected in the DNA panels. The Testament of Simeon, one of the earliest Jewish testaments, echoes this homeland and describes sequences of dispersion, conflict, and renewal that align closely with the patterns displayed in the Seven‑Phase Equation.

The Levant thus stands not only as the beginning of the Mediterranean story, but as the organizing center through which Africa, Europe, and Asia become intelligible. The 99% Levantine match recorded by ADNTRO is not merely a statistical classification; it represents the gravitational pull of a homeland whose genetic signature survived every later movement. The K28 East Mediterranean segments, the Genomelink Near Eastern chromosomes, and the DNAGENICS Middle‑Eastern admixture all converge on the same point. Even the South‑Asian readings—Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, and related signals—align with ancient Indo‑Levant connective routes that predate the Roman world by more than a millennium, as evidenced by the long‑distance trading relationship between the Indus and Mesopotamia documented in Indo‑Mesopotamia relations and Meluhha.

In the Seven‑Phase structure, this Levantine concentration is the foundation upon which all later phases rest: Phase 1 the ancient root, Phase 2 the bridge into Anatolia and the Balkans, Phase 3 the Mediterranean engine, Phase 4 the Central‑European fusion, and Phase 5 the Ashkenazic shell. Without the Levant, the Mediterranean arc cannot be explained; without the Mediterranean arc, the African and Indo‑Eurasian traces lose coherence. The Levantine percentages, occupying nearly every chromosome, form the ancestral center of gravity, the origin point from which every later direction—west into Iberia, south into Africa, east toward Mesopotamia and India, north into Europe—becomes a continuation rather than a beginning.

The story that began with Cornelis Johannes Simons at the Cape, with Sephardic branches in the Maghreb, with Simoni families in Zambia and Tanzania, and with Simmons lines in Ethiopia ultimately circles back to the ancient Levant. Across DNA, archaeology, surname evidence, and historical movement, the same conclusion emerges: the Simonis stream rises from the Near Eastern highlands, enters the Mediterranean world, and only then flows outward into Africa, Europe, and Asia.

The Indus–Dravidian–Roma Corridor: The Eastern Arm of the Ancestral Web

Beyond the Levant and the Mediterranean basin lies the eastern flank of the ancestral network: a corridor that reaches into the Indus Valley, the Dravidian South, and the Silk Road cities of Central Asia. This region forms the least understood yet most essential component of the Simonis admixture structure. Its presence is unmistakable in every genetic system, not as an isolated anomaly but as a coherent echo of ancient trade routes, Jewish dispersions, and the migrations of Roma communities that crossed Asia and entered Europe before the medieval period.

The deepest eastern signal appears in ADNTRO’s population-matching grid. South Asian affinities rank among the strongest global matches after the Mediterranean and Levant: Punjabi at 47%, Gujarati at 36%, Bengali at 31%, Telugu at 27%, and Tamil at 26%. These are not peripheral populations but represent the major ethno‑linguistic clusters of the Indian subcontinent. Punjabi matches reflect northwest Indian ancestry associated with ancient Indo‑Iranian pathways; Gujarati and Bengali matches reveal western and eastern Indo‑Aryan currents; Telugu and Tamil affinities mark unmistakable Dravidian influence from peninsular India.

These South Asian signals are reinforced by Genomelink’s chromosomal-level readings. Multiple chromosomes display mixed Near Eastern and South Asian segments, particularly chromosomes 7, 19, and 21, which show interactions between Levantine, Mediterranean, and Dravidian‑associated signatures. Chromosome 19 is especially telling: its admixture pattern mirrors contact zones between the Near East and South Asia that persisted for over two thousand years, mediated by Arabian seafarers, Persian merchants, and Jewish traders whose networks connected Judea, Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf, and the western coast of India.

K28 confirms these connections through distinct Jewish population clusters located in South and Central Asia. The profile includes measurable components for Indian Jewish, Uzbek Jewish, Azerbaijan Jewish, and Georgian Jewish ancestry, each corresponding to historically documented Jewish communities along the Indo‑Persian caravan and maritime routes. The Bene Israel and Cochin Jews of India maintained traditions of descent from early Judean migrants and from exiles who arrived after the destruction of the Second Temple, traditions studied in overviews such as the history of the Jews in India, the Cochin Jews, and portraits of the Bene Israel. Central Asian Jewish communities in Samarkand, Bukhara, Khorezm, and Balkh likewise formed enduring populations described in accounts of Bukharan Jews and the history of the Jews in Central Asia. These communities developed along Silk Road routes that linked Persia to the Indus world, placing Jewish families squarely within the same network that shaped much of the Simonis admixture profile.

DNAGENICS captures this Indo‑Persian bridge through its Southwest Asia category, which rises to over twenty percent of the total, forming one of the largest single non‑European components in the entire admixture set. This Southwest Asian element occupies the geographic center between the Levant, Persia, and India, and matches the very corridor through which South‑Asian ancestry historically entered Jewish merchant diasporas. When combined with the Middle Eastern category at roughly one‑third, DNAGENICS records more than half of the admixture stemming from interconnected Near Eastern and Southwest Asian populations—the same arc documented in the Levantine and Mediterranean sections.

These South Asian and Central Asian currents appear again in the history of the Roma, whose migration path is one of the best genetically reconstructed movements of the medieval world. Genetic studies of Roma populations show that their ancestry derives primarily from northwestern India, especially groups related to the Punjab region, before moving westward across Iran, Armenia, and the Anatolian plateau toward the Balkans and Europe, as detailed in analyses like “Reconstructing the Indian Origin and Dispersal of the European Roma” and reviews of Roma population genetics. Linguistic research notes that Romani speech preserves Indo‑Aryan grammatical structures and core vocabulary, reinforcing this South‑Asian origin. Additional genetic work demonstrates admixture with Persian, Armenian, Greek, and Balkan populations as the Roma traveled toward Europe, producing a characteristic South‑Asian‑plus‑Balkan profile. These studies outline an extended migratory arc—India → Persia → Anatolia → Balkans → Central Europe—that mirrors the distribution of South Asian ancestry detected in the modern genome. In the Seven‑Phase Equation, this movement corresponds to the shifts between Phase 2 (Anatolian/Balkan) and Phase 4 (Central Europe), forming the eastern thread of the Mediterranean engine.

The ancient foundations of this eastern corridor are even older than the Roma dispersal. During the third millennium BCE, the Indus civilization maintained long‑distance commercial connections with Mesopotamia. Akkadian and Ur III texts refer to merchants arriving from Meluhha, a name widely associated with the Indus region, and describe interactions through Dilmun (Bahrain) and Magan (Oman/UAE). Archaeological excavations have uncovered Indus seals in Mesopotamian sites and Mesopotamian‑style artifacts in the Indus Valley, demonstrating a sustained exchange between these civilizations, as summarized in treatments of Indo‑Mesopotamia relations and in discussions of Meluhha and Meluha, Magan, Dilmun and their locations. This ancient Indo‑Levant corridor predates the Roman world and laid the groundwork for later Jewish, Arab, and Persian merchant networks. The patterns recorded in the genome—South Asian, Southwest Asian, Central Asian, and Near Eastern admixture—mirror the very geography of this Bronze Age system.

Indian Ocean trade linked these regions to Africa as well. Arab, Persian, and Indian traders crossed the Arabian Sea to the Swahili coast, bringing goods, people, and languages that reshaped East Africa for over a millennium, a process illustrated in syntheses of the Swahili Coast and Indian Ocean Trade and world‑history chapters on the Swahili Coast. This maritime world explains why South Asian signals appear alongside African and Levantine components in the admixture profile. The genealogical evidence from Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Zambia—where the Simoni, Simonis, Simmons, and Simeon variants appear in local church, cemetery, and civil records—fits the same pattern of Indo‑African contact zones that persisted into the colonial period.

Across all datasets, the Indus–Dravidian–Roma corridor reveals itself as a structural component of the Simonis lineage. ADNTRO’s South Asian matches, Genomelink’s Dravidian‑bearing chromosomes, K28’s Indian and Central‑Asian Jewish clusters, and DNAGENICS’ Southwest Asian percentage form a unified picture of eastern influence on a lineage whose core remains Levantine and Mediterranean. In the Seven‑Phase Equation, this corridor is the eastern wing of Phase 2 and the hidden eastern strand feeding into Phase 3. It binds India to the Levant, Persia to Judea, and the ancient Indus trade world to the Mediterranean basin.

The name that later appears in Hvar in 1517, in Sicily and Iberia during the medieval period, in Morocco and Algeria after 1492, in Zambia and Tanzania in the twentieth century, and in Ethiopia in modern consular records stands at the convergence of all three structures: the Levantine source, the Mediterranean engine, and the Indus–Dravidian–Roma corridor. The eastern arm of this ancestry is not an addendum to the story but one of its oldest foundations—a forgotten world of Bronze Age trade, Judean diaspora, Indo‑Persian movement, and Roma migration, preserved today in the richest admixture layers of the genome.

The Mediterranean Engine (Phases 1–5): The Core Mechanism of Ancestral Continuity

The Seven-Phase Equation reveals that the heart of the lineage is not dispersed across random epochs or continents. It is concentrated within a single, coherent mechanism: the Mediterranean engine formed by Phases One through Five. These phases, taken together, describe a movement that begins in the Levant, crosses into Anatolia and the Balkans, expands into the Mediterranean basin, and fuses again within the urban centers of Central and Eastern Europe, the same arc traced in overviews of the history of the Jews in Europe and the Sephardic and Ashkenazic worlds. All four principal DNA systems—K28, ADNTRO, Genomelink, and DNAGENICS—affirm this structure, each illuminating a different facet of the same ancestral machine.

Phase One, the Proto‑Hebrew or Levantine root, manifests not only through textual tradition but through the strongest statistical signature recorded in the genetic material. ADNTRO identifies the chromosome set as a 99% match to Levantine populations, a level of correspondence rarely encountered in comparative population genetics. This root appears throughout the K28 model in the form of Iraq Jewish, Yemenite Jewish, and East‑Mediterranean clusters. It appears again in the Genomelink chromosomal analysis: chromosome 7 carries one of the highest concentrations of Near Eastern ancestry in the genome, and chromosomes 5, 13, and 19 show alignments with Levantine, Anatolian, and Arabian profiles. DNAGENICS captures the same foundation through its Middle East admixture assignment of roughly one‑third, the single largest primary category in the Levantine‑Viking K7 framework. Phase One therefore emerges not as an abstract root but as an empirical concentration of Near Eastern genetic continuity.

Phase Two forms the Anatolian and Balkan bridge. Historically, this is the gateway through which Levantine tribes, merchants, captives, and exiles moved northward into the Greek‑speaking and later Slavic‑speaking lands, a movement summarized in accounts of the history of the Jews in Europe. The genetic evidence mirrors this crossing. Chromosomes 5, 12, 13, 14, and 16 in the Genomelink panel demonstrate combinations of East‑Mediterranean, Balkan, Caucasian, and Anatolian signatures. K28 identifies Anatolian and Caucasus components directly, while the Eastern Mediterranean category blends seamlessly with Balkan clusters to form a lateral transition zone between the Near East and Europe. DNAGENICS likewise distributes part of the Southwest Asian and Southern European admixture along the same corridor, reproducing a route long documented in studies of Jewish migrations, Hellenistic demographic patterns, and Roman provincial movements.

Phase Three is the Mediterranean arc, the basin in which Levantine ancestry reshaped itself into Sephardic, North‑African, and Judeo‑Iberian form. The K28 model displays its most dramatic values here: a dominant West Mediterranean component, a substantial East Mediterranean signal, a Sephardic Jewish peak, and a Moroccan Jewish layer, with additional contributions from Yemenite, Iraqi, Georgian, Indian, and Central Asian Jewish communities that historically interacted with the Mediterranean trade system. Chromosome 9 holds one of the greatest concentrations of Sephardic and Mediterranean input, and chromosomes 21 and 22 show a strong mixture of Maghrebi, Iberian, and Levantine patterns. These signals align with the historical movement of Judean captives to Sicily after 63 BCE, the dispersal after 70 CE, the Jewish settlements documented across North Africa during the Roman, Byzantine, and early Islamic eras, and the large‑scale migrations of Sephardic families after the Iberian expulsions of 1492–1497, as described in treatments of the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain and the Sephardic diaspora.

Phase Four represents the Central‑European fusion, the period when Mediterranean Jewish communities merged with the populations of Germany, the Low Countries, Austria, Bohemia, Switzerland, and Eastern France. This is the environment that produced the early Simonis surname forms recognizable in medieval and early modern Central Europe, positioned along the routes discussed in syntheses like Jews in Europe: a unique story in space and time. The genetic data corroborates this phase with remarkable precision. K28 registers enormous West European values, an indicator not of origin but of prolonged residence and integration within that region. Genomelink’s chromosomal patterns show heavy Northwestern and Central European influence on chromosomes 1, 10, 11, 16, and 21, consistent with long‑term settlement. ADNTRO reports high affinity with Northwestern European panels, aligning with Phase Four’s geographic position in the model. DNAGENICS contributes Western Europe and North Sea percentages that correspond not to the deepest ancestry but to the northern envelope built around older Mediterranean layers, much like the European components described in population‑genetic studies of Ashkenazi and Central‑European Jews such as “The time and place of European admixture in Ashkenazi Jewish history” and “Signatures of founder effects, admixture, and selection in the Ashkenazi Jewish population”.

Phase Five completes the Mediterranean engine by forming the Ashkenazic and Eastern European protective shell around the older layers. K28 identifies Ashkenazi Jewish and Romanian Jewish components at substantial levels, both representing the northern expansions of Jewish communities that drew on ancestry from the Mediterranean, the Near East, and occasionally Central Asia. Chromosomes 19, 20, and 21 show pronounced Ashkenazic and Eastern European admixture in the Genomelink results. ADNTRO reports high affinities with Toscani, Iberian, and Northwestern European reference sets, which together create a tri‑continental overlay typical of Ashkenazic populations that combine Middle Eastern and European ancestral layers. DNAGENICS’ Middle Eastern, Southern European, and Western European categories reflect the admixture pattern found in DNA studies of medieval and Renaissance Jewish communities in Germany, Poland, Lithuania, and Bohemia, where a Near Eastern core combined with substantial Southern and Eastern European gene flow, as seen in research on Ashkenazi Jewish admixture and related ancient DNA work like “Ancient DNA provides new insights into Ashkenazi Jewish history”. In the Seven‑Phase Equation, Phase Five acts as the northern mantel that preserved much of the older Mediterranean–Levantine ancestry through centuries of European demographic change.

Taken together, these five phases form a single operating system—the Mediterranean engine. Phase One supplies the ancient Near Eastern root; Phase Two provides the route into Anatolia and the Balkans; Phase Three anchors the lineage in the Sephardic, North‑African, and Judeo‑Iberian world; Phase Four restructures it within Central Europe; and Phase Five builds the Ashkenazic shell that carried it into the modern period. Every genetic system—K28, ADNTRO, Genomelink, DNAGENICS—converges on these same structural layers. The engine is historical, geographical, and biological at once.

The genealogical record echoes this same pattern. The earliest Simonis entries in Venetian Hvar in 1517 appear at the northern fringe of the Mediterranean arc, and later Simonis families are documented in Iberia, Italy, Morocco, Croatia, Sicily, the Low Countries, and the Rhineland, mirroring the chronology of Jewish migration outlined in histories of the Jews in Europe. When combined with the African and Indus‑Dravidian data already established, the Mediterranean engine becomes the central mechanism that binds all other movements into a coherent story.

This engine explains why the genome carries a Levantine core, a Mediterranean mantle, a Central‑European reconfiguration, and an Ashkenazic preservation layer. It explains why South‑Asian elements appear not as isolated intrusions but as a continuation of ancient Levantine–Indus trade routes. It explains why African segments appear in chromosomes linked to maritime exchange, North‑African diaspora, and Judeo‑Arab migrations. And it explains why later northern admixture—Phase Seven—could encapsulate but never erase the older Mediterranean structure that forms the core of the lineage.

The Mediterranean engine is therefore not one part of the story. It is the story’s center. From this mechanism the African corridor and the Indus‑Dravidian route radiate outward, and into this mechanism the northern expansion will eventually fold.

The African Engine (Phase 6): The Hinge of the Ancestral Machine

Phase Six stands at the center of the Seven-Phase Equation not as an extension of Africa, but as its engine—an axial point where Africa, the Levant, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean converge. Without this hinge, the other phases describe movements isolated from one another. With it, they become a single system, a corridor that joins the ancient world to the modern, the eastern migrations to the western, the southern trade routes to the northern destinations.

Unlike the heavily European imprint of Phase Seven or the multi-layered Mediterranean core of Phases One through Five, Phase Six carries a quieter but unmistakable signal. Its traces appear in both the genome and the record of names that passed through Africa’s coastlines, inland basins, and highland kingdoms. It is small in percentage but vast in historical implication, because it links three continents into a single narrative.

The documentary evidence establishes Africa as a host and transmitter of Simeon-root surnames long before the modern period. The earliest known African witnesses—Cornelis Johannes Simons in 1691 and Agatha Simons in 1688—anchor the lineage in the Cape Colony’s earliest administrative records. Their presence coincides with a society built from Dutch, Malagasy, Khoe, Indian, Javanese, Arab, and Sephardic elements, a crossroads of the Old World and Africa described in studies of early Cape slavery and VOC trade. The surname reappears in the nineteenth century with Jean Jaques Simonis, Anna Catharina Theron, and their children in Paarl and Pietz, recorded in Cape baptismal registers such as the entry for Jacob Daniel Simonis. Later generations of Simonis families populate the church books and civil registers of Cape Town, Worcester, and surrounding districts, embedding the name in the rural and urban fabric of the Western Cape.

The eastern half of the continent adds another body of evidence. The Swahili coast, a world shaped by centuries of Indian Ocean commerce, preserves Simonis variants in cemeteries and wartime records. The grave of William Simmons, who died in 1881 and was buried at Grave Island Cemetery near Zanzibar, anchors the name in the archipelago that once dominated regional gold and ivory routes. The grave of Nkata Simon in the Dar es Salaam War Cemetery records his death on 6 April 1945 during the period when East African troops and laborers were mobilized across Tanganyika and beyond. An even earlier link between East Africa and Europe is visible in the baptism of Joaquina Simoins, born in Mara, Tanzania, in 1782 and baptized in Lisbon, revealing an eighteenth‑century corridor between East Africa and Iberia that matches the long-distance connections outlined in Swahili Coast world‑history overviews.

Inland from the coast, the name unfolds again in Zambian records along the old hinterland routes that connected the Great Lakes and the Zambezi basin to the Indian Ocean. Parish registers from the mid‑twentieth century record the baptism of Dominic Simon at Sacred Heart Parish in Zambia, naming Simon Kapamba and Langiwe Daka as parents, and on the same date a matching entry for Paul Simon lists the same parental pair. In Mawbwe, a baptismal record for Cecilia Evalina Simoni in 1971 identifies her as daughter of Simon Mekesi and Merika Jowo. A Northern Rhodesia baptism for Ingrid Mary Angela Simonis, born in 1953 to Felix Simonis and Margarita Beuling, shows Simonis as a European‑coded surname embedded in a colonial Zambian setting. And in the Lusaka district, the baptisms of Patricia Simeon and George Simeon at Kaunda Square in 1979 show a family headed by Maximiano Simeon and Teresa Mijere. In a single country, four closely related forms—Simon, Simoni, Simonis, Simeon—stand side by side, testifying to the way biblical and European forms were naturalized within African Christian communities along the inland caravan routes described in syntheses of Indian Ocean trade 1000–1500.

The Horn of Africa adds a further set of witnesses. The consular birth record of Daniel Benjamin Simmons, born in Addis Ababa on 24 May 1974 and registered in the General Register Office’s overseas indices, confirms a Simmons form rooted in Ethiopia. The life of Jane Ellen Simmons, born in Addis Ababa in 1950, can be followed through changes in the United States Social Security index, where her name appears under Bartholomay, Simmons, and a shortened J. Simmons across different filing dates, and through her obituary in the El Paso Times (El Paso obituary). Additional Ethiopian‑linked records include Tess Darah Mitu Simmons, Barbara Eden Simmons, Aster Simon, and John Mathew Simon. Each shows a Simeon‑root surname linked to Ethiopia and then carried outward along modern migration paths that form part of the broader African diaspora.

West Africa contributes one more witness positioned within the Atlantic world. In the 1930 United States census, Elies Simmins appears as a thirty‑seven‑year‑old woman born in Nigeria, with both parents also recorded as Nigerian‑born. Her surname, carrying an extra m, illustrates how English‑patterned biblical names could be adopted and adapted in West African settings and then carried into the diaspora, paralleling patterns discussed in long‑form modules on trade and religion in the Indian Ocean/Atlantic networks and the African diaspora.

This constellation of African‑held surname forms intersects with the genetic record in ways that reveal Phase Six as the structural hinge. K28 measures North African and East African components on several chromosomes; these same chromosomes often carry Mediterranean and Levantine signals, suggesting admixture pathways through Judeo‑Arab, Berber, and Swahili populations. DNAGENICS’ Africa‑9 framework identifies measurable Northwest Africa and Southern Africa components, small in percentage but aligned with the known histories of Sephardic settlement in the Maghreb and the mixed populations of the Cape. ADNTRO reinforces this with population affinities to groups such as Luhya, Gambian Mandinka, Mende, Esan, and Yoruba, all markers of ancient and medieval African admixture in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Genomelink detects East African traces along scattered autosomal segments, consistent with an admixture event too old to dominate but too persistent to disappear.

Beneath these modern genetic categories lies the historical system that made them possible. The Swahili coast was one of the most active trade networks of the medieval world, binding East Africa to Arabia, Persia, and India. The ports of Kilwa, Mombasa, Zanzibar, Sofala, and Mogadishu served as clearing houses for gold, ivory, grain, textiles, and enslaved people, as described in Swahili Coast world‑history chapters and teaching units on the Swahili Coast and Indian Ocean trade. Inland, these trade arteries extended into the Great Lakes region, the Congo basin, and the Zambezi valley—precisely where Simon, Simoni, Simonis, and Simeon families appear in Zambian records.

This African corridor did not operate in isolation. Its northern terminus connected directly to the Red Sea route leading into Egypt, Palestine, and Arabia, part of the broader Horn/Red Sea system active from the late Bronze Age through the Islamic period. Its eastern terminus connected the Swahili ports to India, linking Africa to the oldest Indo‑Levant trade system established between the Indus Valley, Dilmun, Magan, and Mesopotamia, as reconstructed in studies of Indo‑Mesopotamia relations and Meluhha. Its western terminus flowed into Atlantic networks, including the Indian Ocean and trans‑Atlantic slave trades, that eventually carried Nigerian and other West African populations into Europe and the Americas, outlined in surveys of Indian Ocean trade 1000–1500.

It is this network that Phase Six captures. Not a singular event, but the continental hinge through which African, Levantine, Mediterranean, and South‑Asian ancestries passed into one another. Every genetic system detects this hinge: K28 through its North African and East African constructs; ADNTRO through its African population affinities; DNAGENICS through its Africa‑9 segments; Genomelink through scattered chromosomal traces. Every historical system confirms it: Swahili and Red Sea trade routes, Judeo‑Arab migrations across North Africa, the Maghrebi Sephardic corridor, and Indo‑African maritime exchanges along the Indian Ocean.

Phase Six is the engine that binds the story together. Without it, the Levantine source, the Mediterranean arc, and the Indus–Dravidian corridor remain separate migrations. With it, they form a single Afro‑Eurasian system—a system in which the Simonis name appears again and again across Africa, preserved in parish books, cemetery stones, manumission records, and colonial registers, each a surviving echo of a movement that began in the Levant, crossed through the Mediterranean, and expanded into the African world.

The Northern Delivery (Phase 7): The Final Casing of the Lineage

Phase Seven is often read as a beginning because it dominates the uppermost layers of the genome. Yet the Seven‑Phase Equation identifies it as the final casing—the last structural layer formed after the long passage through the Levant, the Mediterranean, Africa, and the eastern circuits. Its magnitude in the modern profile reflects not the depth of origin but the density of settlement, the centuries spent within the societies of Northern and Western Europe. If the Mediterranean engine shapes the inner movement of the lineage, Phase Seven shapes its outer appearance.

The K28 model makes this clear. Its largest regional value by far is the West European component, a signal not of ancient descent but of sustained residence in the regions of France, the Low Countries, Germany, and the North Sea basin. These areas formed the demographic heart of Central and Western European Jewry from the medieval period onward, as summarized in surveys of the history of the Jews in Europe and reflections on Jewish migration in Europe. In the same dataset, Eastern European and Baltic components appear alongside a strong Finnish value, indicating passage through the northern arc that bends from the Rhineland and Low Countries into Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic shore, Finland, and the Scandinavian coast.

Genomelink reinforces this interpretation at the chromosomal level. Autosomes 1, 10, 11, 12, 16, and 21 show strong Northwestern and Central European affinities, consistent with prolonged habitation within Germanic and Celtic‑European population structures. Chromosome 12, in particular, carries a complex admixture pattern of Northern European and Mediterranean segments, illustrating how older Levantine–Mediterranean ancestry can sit beneath a thick northern overlay. Chromosome 16 displays a similar mixed structure, with a Western European outer shell riding atop internal Mediterranean and Levantine features. These configurations match the historical path of Sephardic, Maghrebi, and Levantine‑descended families who entered Central Europe in the medieval period and later spread northward across the continent.

ADNTRO’s population affinities offer additional corroboration. The sample aligns at very high levels with Northwestern European, British, and Finnish reference sets, a cluster of matches that point not to ancient origin in these populations but to substantial European admixture over many generations. The same profile reports strong affinities to composite Latin American panels such as Colombian and Puerto Rican, both reflecting Iberian and North Atlantic genetic patterns shaped by colonial movements rather than deeper roots. These affinities arose from the late‑medieval and early‑modern period when the lineage entered the northern world and then participated in Atlantic‑era migrations traced in studies of why and when Jews migrate.

DNAGENICS presents the same architecture through its admixture panels. In its Levantine‑Viking K7 analysis, the North Sea and Western Europe categories, combined with a substantial Southern Europe component and a strong Middle East base, create the mixed signature characteristic of families that traveled from the Mediterranean into Central Europe and then into northern territories, as discussed in treatments of Ashkenazi Jewish genetics and Ashkenazi founder effects and admixture. Its broader Eurasian models likewise show European segments scattered across the genome and layered atop earlier Mediterranean and Near Eastern strata, mirroring independent population‑genetic work that finds both clear Near‑Eastern ancestry and significant Southern and Eastern European admixture in Ashkenazi and related European Jewish populations.

The surname record mirrors this chromosomal and admixture stratigraphy. After appearing in the Adriatic in 1517, and in Iberia, Italy, and North Africa in the medieval and post‑expulsion centuries, the Simonis name emerges in the Low Countries, the Rhineland, and the German‑speaking lands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These include Simonis families in Brabant, Liège, Aachen, Cologne, Prussia, Bohemia, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, as well as the overwritten variant in 1650 Tilburg where the Simonis surname appears under a conversion‑altered registry, paralleling patterns discussed in resources on German‑Jewish migration. The earliest Central European entries coincide with the same period in which Judeo‑Iberian families, Sephardic merchants, and Levantine‑descended Jews entered northern centers such as Amsterdam, Hamburg, Antwerp, Prague, and Cologne. The surname’s later appearance in Scandinavia and Britain aligns with the genetic affinities measured in the Northwestern European and Finnish categories.

Phase Seven therefore forms the final destination of a much older migration. It does not describe where the lineage began, but where it settled after centuries of movement. Its Northern European imprint rests atop layers formed by the Levantine root of Phase One, the Anatolian–Balkan passage of Phase Two, the Sephardic–Mediterranean expansion of Phase Three, the Central‑European fusion of Phase Four, and the Ashkenazic mantle of Phase Five. And beneath all these is the African hinge of Phase Six, the continental bridge through which eastern, southern, and western influences moved into contact long before the surname reached the northern latitudes.

The northern casing completes the story of movement. It contains the genetic memory of Judean dispersions, of Mediterranean commerce, of Maghrebi refuge, of the Swahili coast, of African integration, of the Indo‑Levant bridge, and of the Silk Road. It stands as the final environment in which the lineage stabilized, adopting the languages, cultures, and admixture patterns of the North Sea world while carrying within its genome the deeper structures of Africa, Asia, and the Levant.

Phase Seven is thus not the story’s origin but its culmination. It gathers together every previous phase and situates them in the modern world, forming the final outward expression of a lineage whose journey began in the highlands of the ancient Near East and passed through the Mediterranean, Africa, and the eastern routes before entering the northern sphere. The uppermost layer of the genome is European, but its foundation is Levantine; its engine is Mediterranean; its hinge is African; and its eastern arm reaches back to the Indus Valley. The northern casing preserves all these histories within a single living structure, completing the sevenfold arc of the ancestral equation.

The Complete Synthesis: The Seven-Phase Equation and the DNA Architecture of the Lineage

The four macro-corridors of human movement—Levantine, Mediterranean, African, and Indus–Dravidian—do not appear in isolation within the genome. They interlock across all twenty-two chromosomes in a layered structure that mirrors the Seven-Phase Equation so precisely that each dataset becomes an independent witness to the same ancestral design. Chromosomal patterns, surname distributions, historical trade routes, and comparative population panels all converge upon one continuous story.

At the foundation of this structure lies the Levant. Within ADNTRO’s population-matching framework, the sample scores a 99 percent similarity to a Levantine reference population. This is not an ancestry percentage; it is a measure of how closely the DNA profile matches their Levantine panel compared to other groups. That single similarity score independently confirms what the historical model predicts: a deep root in the Near East. Within DNA Genics, the internal K28 panel reinforces this alignment. K28 is one of the admixture tools inside the DNA Genics platform, and its Jewish-labeled categories—such as Iraq Jewish, Yemenite Jewish, Azerbaijan Jewish, Georgian Jewish, and Indian Jewish—collectively map onto population structures anchored in and around the Near East. Genomelink’s chromosome-by-chromosome view shows Near-Eastern affinity on several autosomes, especially chromosomes 7, 5, 13, 19, and 22. DNAGENICS’ Levantine–Viking panel assigns 32.27 percent to its Middle East component, identifying the deepest layer of the genome as West Asian / Levantine. All of these different systems—each using distinct reference panels and algorithms—place the origin of the genetic framework squarely in Phase One and Phase Two of the Seven-Phase Equation.

Around this Levantine root, the Mediterranean engine becomes the main body of the ancestral mechanism. Inside DNA Genics, the K28 panel picks up very strong West Mediterranean, East Mediterranean, Sephardic Jewish, and Moroccan Jewish signals. Genomelink’s chromosomal results place substantial Mediterranean admixture on chromosomes such as 9, 12, 21, and 22, often in combination with North-African and Near-Eastern segments. Historically, these patterns mirror the routes taken by Judean captives after Pompey’s conquest in 63 BCE, by Jewish communities under Roman and Byzantine rule, by merchants and scholars moving between Alexandria, Sicily, Carthage, and Iberia, and by Sephardic exiles after the decrees of 1492–1497, as described in discussions of the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain and the Sephardic diaspora. The Mediterranean basin is the stage on which Levantine ancestry was transformed into Sephardic, North-African, and Judeo-Iberian forms, corresponding to Phase Three of the Seven-Phase Equation.

Africa forms the hinge that connects this Mediterranean engine to the wider Afro-Eurasian web. Here the surname evidence speaks in concrete archival entries. In the late seventeenth century, the name appears in the Cape Colony’s records with Cornelis Johannes Simons in the VOC “Slave Wills and Testaments” of 1691 and Agatha Simons in the 1688 “Slave Manumissions” of Table Valley. By the early nineteenth century, a fully formed Simonis family appears in Cape church registers, including the baptism of Jacob Daniel Simonis and other children of Jean Jaques Simonis and Anna Catharina Theron, and later Simonis entries spread through the marriage, membership, and death registers of Cape Town, Paarl, and Worcester. On the eastern side of the continent, a burial for William Simmons in 1881 at Grave Island Cemetery near Zanzibar and a war grave for Nkata Simon in Dar es Salaam in 1945 place Simeon-root forms along the Swahili coast. The baptism of Joaquina Simoins, born in Mara, Tanzania, in 1782 but baptized in a parish near Lisbon, shows an East Africa–Iberia connection in the late eighteenth century. Inland, Zambian parish books preserve entries for Dominic Simon, Cecilia Evalina Simoni, Ingrid Mary Angela Simonis, Patricia Simeon, and George Simeon, showing Simon, Simoni, Simonis, and Simeon side by side in mid-twentieth-century Zambia. In the Horn of Africa, Ethiopian-linked records for Daniel Benjamin Simmons, Jane Ellen Simmons, Tess Darah Mitu Simmons, Barbara Eden Simmons, Aster Simon, and John Mathew Simon show the name embedded in Ethiopian, American, and European contexts. West Africa adds Elies Simmins, a Nigerian-born woman recorded in the 1930 U.S. census.

Genetically, Phase Six appears as a subtle but consistent African layer. Within DNA Genics, the K28 panel detects North-African and East-African components on some of the same chromosomes that carry Mediterranean and Levantine values. DNAGENICS’ Africa‑9 and combined Eurasia models identify Northwest-African and Southern-African traces nested inside a larger West-Asian and European framework. ADNTRO reports non-zero similarity matches with African reference groups such as Luhya, Yoruba, Esan, Mende, Mandinka, and African Caribbean, but again these are match strengths, not direct ancestry percentages. Genomelink shows African segments scattered along particular autosomes in a pattern consistent with older admixture rather than a recent, dominant event. All of this aligns with what is known from the history of the Swahili Coast and Indian Ocean trade 1000–1500—networks that linked East Africa, Arabia, India, and the Mediterranean for centuries.

The eastern arm of the equation, the Indus–Dravidian–Roma corridor, is written into the genome in a similar way. ADNTRO reports strong similarity matches with South-Asian panels—Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, Telugu, and Tamil—meaning the DNA profile overlaps these reference populations more than many others in their grid, without implying that these percentages equal the exact ancestral mixture. These affinities correspond closely to known ancient contact zones. Bronze Age Mesopotamian texts describe trade with Meluhha, likely associated with the Indus region, and document maritime routes through Dilmun and Magan; modern syntheses of Indo‑Mesopotamia relations gather the inscriptions, artifacts, and seal finds that prove sustained contact between the Indus Valley and West Asia. Later, Jewish communities in India—such as those described in the history of the Jews in India, including Cochin Jews and Bene Israel—and Central‑Asian Jewish populations in Samarkand and Bukhara, traced in overviews of Bukharan Jews and the history of the Jews in Central Asia, occupy the same Indo‑Persian–Central Asian corridors. DNA Genics’ K28 panel contains components labeled Uzbek Jewish, Azerbaijan Jewish, and Indian Jewish that sit in these regions. DNAGENICS’ Southwest Asia category adds another layer that geographically spans Iran, the Caucasus, and the Indo‑Iranian frontier. Genetic studies of the Roma confirm that many Roma lineages derive from north‑western India and then move across Persia and the Balkans into Europe, as shown in the Roma origin and dispersal study and later reviews of Roma population genetics. In the Seven-Phase Equation, this forms the eastern limb of Phase Two and an input into Phase Three.

These deep layers together form the Mediterranean engine—Phases One through Five—which shapes the internal architecture of the genome. Over that engine, the final casing of Phase Seven, the Northern delivery, becomes the most visible outer layer. Inside DNA Genics, the K28 panel registers its largest overall contribution not in the Levant or Mediterranean categories, but in West European and related Northwestern European regions. ADNTRO matches the sample very closely to Northwestern European, British, Iberian, and Finnish panels, indicating that the modern genome looks, at the surface, very similar to populations formed in northern and western Europe. Genomelink finds strong Northern and Central European components on chromosomes 1, 10, 11, 12, 16, and 21. DNAGENICS assigns substantial proportions to Western Europe, North Sea, and Southern Europe in its composite admixture panels. This is the genetic signature of Phase Seven: a long period of residence in the northern world—England, the Netherlands, Germany, Scandinavia, and the Atlantic diaspora—after all earlier phases had already assembled the deeper structure, matching patterns described for Ashkenazi and European Jewry in studies such as “The time and place of European admixture in Ashkenazi Jewish history” and “Signatures of founder effects, admixture, and selection in the Ashkenazi Jewish population”.

Yet this northern casing does not erase the underlying story; it preserves it. Inside the European shell lies the Levantine foundation identified by ADNTRO, K28, Genomelink, and DNAGENICS. Inside it lies the Mediterranean mass of Sephardic and North-African ancestry expressed in the K28 Jewish clusters and in the chromosomes that carry Iberian and Maghrebi mixes. Inside it lies the African hinge, written in Cape, Swahili, Ethiopian, Zambian, and Nigerian records and in the African traces of each panel. Inside it lies the Indus–Dravidian resonance, recorded not as a dominant ancestry layer but as a clear similarity footprint between this genome and several South-Asian reference populations, and in the West-Asian and Central-Asian categories that bridge India to the Levant.

When all twenty-two chromosomes, all platforms, and all historical lines are placed side by side, they tell the same story. A lineage arises in the Levant. It is carried into the Mediterranean world and reshaped there. It passes through Africa as a continental hinge, while also touching the Indus and Central Asia through ancient trade and diasporas. It is then re‑cast in Central and Eastern Europe and finally sealed in the northern Atlantic world. The Seven-Phase Equation does not impose this pattern on the data; it describes the pattern that the data itself reveals.

The Simonis line is therefore Levantine in origin, Mediterranean in development, African in connection, Indo‑Dravidian in resonance, and Northern European in its final presentation. K28 as a DNA Genics panel, ADNTRO’s similarity scores, Genomelink’s chromosome-by-chromosome ancestry, and DNAGENICS’ admixture models all converge on this architecture. Together with the African, Mediterranean, and European records of the Simeon-root surname, they complete the seven‑fold arc of the ancestral equation.