The origin of the Qajar Shah dynasty according to their Y-DNA

Abstract

The subject of the study was the genealogy of the Qajar dynasty, which ruled Iran in 1795-1925. Documentary sources indicate Gara Piri bey Qajar (XV century – 1513), the first beglyarbek of Karabakh with the center in Ganja (now Azerbaijan) as the earliest ancestor of the dynasty. At the end of the XVI century, the great–grandson of Gar Piri bey was appointed Shah Abbas I beglyarbek of Astrabad (now Gorgan, Iran), from whose descendant - Agha Muhammad Khan Qajar (1741-1797), the shah dynasty began. Agha-Mohammed Khan himself traced his family back to a legendary ancestor named Qajar, the son of Sartak-noyon from the Mongolian Jalai tribe, the mentor of Genghisid Argun Khan (1284-1291). According to other sources, the Qajars are a Turkoman tribe that settled in Transcaucasia during the Mongol period. These data on the early history point to the Qajar dynasty as having originally Central Asian origin. In 2007, a study of the Y-DNA of two modern representatives of different lines of the Qajar dynasty was conducted. Tests have shown that both lines really originate from a recent common paternal ancestor and belong to haplogroup J1-M267, widespread in the Middle East. However, apart from the genetic confirmation of the common paternal origin of these two lines and the declaration of the marginality of the ancestral legend, there is virtually no analysis in the work that gives a definitive answer to the question of the origin of the dynasty itself. In the development of this work, a more in-depth study of Y-DNA by new generation sequencing methods was carried out. The paternal origin of the Qajar dynasty from the indigenous population of the northern regions of Azerbaijan has been revealed.