Two of the genes, GTF2I and GTF2IRD1, had previously been linked to
social behavior in mice as well as in people with Williams syndrome. In
2009, Uta Francke and her colleagues at Stanford University in
California found that mice were unusually eager to socialize
when they were missing those two genes. But until Francke saw the new
study, she had no idea that the genes she had studied might help explain
the behavior of her own dog, a Bernese mountain dog named Minna.
"She walks up to strangers and wants interaction with everybody, just
like the Williams kids," said Francke, who has worked with people with
Williams syndrome in her career as a medical geneticist. "To think that
this is because of the involvement of these genes in some way -- I find
that extremely exciting."
The connection between dogs and Williams syndrome will likely ring
true for people within the Williams syndrome community as well, said
Jocelyn Krebs, a biomedical researcher at the University of Alaska
Anchorage who has studied Williams syndrome and was not involved in the
new study. Krebs has a son with Williams syndrome, and she sits on the
Williams syndrome Association board of trustees, so she knows how
friendly people with the condition can be.
"If they had tails, they would wag them," she said.
The findings are consistent with current theories of dog
domestication. Once, researchers assumed that ancient humans
domesticated dogs on purpose, adopting wolf pups and breeding them for
useful traits. Biologists Ray and Lorna Coppinger have pioneered a
different view, seeing early dogs as scavengers on human trash.
According to this theory, shy wolves continued to hunt in the forest,
while bolder wolves that could tolerate humans took up residence at
village rubbish heaps.
Ray Coppinger himself avoids words like "friendly" when referring to
these ancestral dogs. But according to Clive Wynne, a behavioral
scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, and one of the
new study's authors, sociability could have been a key trait that helped
early dogs get access to human scraps. The new study suggests that dogs
achieved that friendliness in part through changes to the genes that
are equivalent to those affected in people with Williams syndrome.
"Outside of, like, Disney movies, animals all just making friends
with each other and being lovey-dovey out in the forest is pretty much a
catastrophe," said Wynne. But, he said, "If you have a mutation that
makes you more willing to make friends, well then, you're going to get a
lot more out of the trash dump."
Wynne can’t say for sure whether the domestication process happened
at multiple villages at different times, or if it happened just once, as
indicated by another recent study that looked at DNA from ancient dog fossils.
It's too soon to know just how important the genes identified in the
study were in dog domestication, cautioned Ray Coppinger, during an
interview with Inside Science. But it's possible that they played a
pivotal role, not just for dogs, but for other species as well, said
Carlos Driscoll, a geneticist who studies cat domestication at the
National Institutes of Health in Rockville, Maryland. The next step,
said Driscoll, is to test other domestic species, and see whether the
same three genes may contribute to tame temperaments in everything from
cats to goats.
"The only thing that's common among all domesticates is that they're
sociable -- that they get along with people," said Driscoll. "This very
strongly suggests that this region and these genes are important in
domestication."
"It would not actually be a fake tan, it would be the real thing,"
one of the team, David Fisher from the Massachusetts General Hospital
and Harvard University, told The Guardian."It would just be sunless."
Back in 2006,
Fisher and his colleagues discovered that a plant extract called
forskolin could produce a cancer-protecting tan in red-haired mice,
without being triggered by harmful UV radiation (sunlight).
That
was a pretty big deal, because when your red-headed friend complains
about going from pale to a straight-up burn when they hit the beach -
with no tan in between - they're not just overreacting.
Redheads contain a variant of the MC1R gene,
which not only imparts red hair and fair skin, but also messes with a
receptor molecule that sits on the surface of skin cells called
melanocytes.
early 15c., "not in accord with physical nature," from un- (1) "not" + natural (adj.). Meaning "artificial" is attested from 1746; that of "at variance with moral standards" is from 1520s"
"contrary to the ordinary course of nature; abnormal"
In non-redheads, this receptor works with the melanocytes to
produce dark melanin pigments on the skin in response to UV radiation,
but by some cruel twist of fate, the redhead variant doesn't do this, so
the skin tends to burn.
When the researchers applied forskolin to
the skin of mice that had been genetically engineered to have fair skin
and rust-coloured fur - an analogue for red-haired people - it
stimulated the production of melanin.
Here's a comparison, where a high dosage of forskolin gave the red-haired mice temporary black skin:
The treated mice were exposed to UV rays, and when compared to
untreated red-haired mice, they experienced less sunburn and DNA damage,
and were less likely to develop skin cancer tumours.
This is because dark melanin pigment is able to disperse more than 99.9 percent of harmful UV rays absorbed by the skin, so the more you have of it, the better protected your cells are.
But there was one problem. The compound didn't work on humans - our skin is five times thicker than mouse skin, and far better at keeping foreign chemicals out.
Now, a decade later, the researchers have come up with a
solution that they think will actually work on us - a different class of
compounds that can not only boost the pigmentation process, but also
squeeze through the outer layers of our epidermis.
These tiny molecules work by inhibiting SIK (Salt Inducible Kinase) enzymes in the skin, which is like a 'master off switch' for melanin production.
When a strong dose of the compound was tested in red-haired mice, it turned them black within a couple of days, just like the forskolin.
When
tested on donated human skin samples, the tanning response could be
adjusted based on dosage and frequency of use, and could last for
several days without reapplication.
Snub-nosed monkeys are a group of Old World monkeys and make up the entirety of the genusRhinopithecus. The genus is rare and needs much more research. Some taxonomists group snub-nosed monkeys together with the genus Pygathrix.
In the Roman foundation myth, it was a she-wolf that nursed and sheltered the twins Romulus and Remus after they were abandoned in the wild by order of King Amulius of Alba Longa. She cared for the infants at her den, a cave known as the Lupercal, until they were discovered by a shepherd, Faustulus. Romulus would later become the founder and first king of Rome. The image of the she-wolf suckling the twins has been a symbol of Rome since ancient times and is one of the most recognizable icons of ancient mythology.
The story of Dhul-Qarnayn (in Arabic ذو القرنين, literally "The Two-Horned One", also transliterated as Zul-Qarnain or Zulqarnain), mentioned in the Quran, may be a reference to Alexander III of Macedon (356–323 BC), popularly known as Alexander the Great.[1] Some Western and traditional Muslim scholars identify Alexander the Great as Dhul-Qarnayn (Quran 18:83–94).[2][3] However, some early Muslim scholars believed it to be a reference to a pre-Islamic monarch from Persia or south Arabia,[4] with, according to Maududi, modern Muslim scholarship also leaning in favour of identifying him with Cyrus the Great.[5]
Peter Bietenholz argues that the story of Dhul-Qarnayn has its
origins in legends of Alexander the Great current in the Middle East in
the early years of the Christian era.[6] According to these legends, the Scythians, the descendants of Gog and Magog, once defeated one of Alexander's generals, upon which Alexander built a wall in the Caucasus mountains to keep them out of civilized lands (the basic elements are found in Flavius Josephus).The
scholar Stephen Gero, sharing similar views, inserts that the earliest
possible date for the Gog & Magog gate-narrative in this form dates
to between 629-636, thus tentatively concluding the syriac Alexander
Romance "stricte dictu cannot be considered as a source of the Qur’anic
narrative", due to the fact that there is absolute consent among Western[7] and Muslim[8][9] scholars that Surah 18 belongs to the second Meccan Period (615-619).[10] Similar reservations are offered by Brannon Wheeler.
Since the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC there has been no age
in history, whether in the West or in the East, in which his name and
exploits have not been familiar. And yet not only have all contemporary
records been lost but even the work based on those records though
written some four and a half centuries after his death, the Anabasis of Arrian,
was totally unknown to the writers of the Middle Ages and became
available to Western scholarship only with the Revival of Learning [the
Renaissance]. The perpetuation of Alexander's fame through so many ages
and amongst so many peoples is due in the main to the innumerable
recensions and transmogrifications of a work known as the Alexander Romance or Pseudo-Callisthenes.
The Christianized peoples of the Near East, inheritors of both the Hellenic as well as Judaic strands of the Alexander romance, further theologized Alexander until in some stories he was depicted as a saint. The Christian legends turned the ancient Greek conqueror Alexander III into Alexander "the Believing King", implying that he was a believer in monotheism. Eventually elements of the Alexander romance were combined with Biblical legends such as Gog and Magog.
There have been many theories regarding the date and sources of this curious work [the Alexander romance].
According to the most recent authority, ... it was compiled by a
Greco-Egyptian writing in Alexandria about A.D. 300. The sources on
which the anonymous author drew were twofold. On the one hand he made
use of a `romanticized history of Alexander of a highly rhetorical type
depending on the Cleitarchus tradition, and with this he amalgamated a collection of imaginary letters derived from an Epistolary Romance of Alexander written in the first century B.C. He also included two long letters from Alexander to his mother Olympias and his tutor Aristotle
describing his marvellous adventures in India and at the end of the
World. These are the literary expression of a living popular tradition
and as such are the most remarkable and interesting part of the work.[16]
The Greek variants of the Alexander romance continued to evolve until, in the 4th century, the Greek legend was translated into Latin by Julius Valerius Alexander Polemius (where it is called the Res gestae Alexandri Magni) and from Latin it spread to all major vernacular languages of Europe in the Middle Ages. Around the same as its translation into Latin, the Greek text was also translated into the Syriac language and from Syriac it spread to eastern cultures and languages as far afield as China and Southeast Asia.[17] The Syriac legend was the source of an Arabic variant called the Qisas Dhul-Qarnayn (Tales of Dhul-Qarnayn)[18] and a Persian variant called the Iskandarnamah (Book of Alexander), as well as Armenian and Ethiopic translations.[19]
The version recorded in Syriac is of particular importance because it was current in the Middle East during the time of the Quran's writing and is regarded as being closely related to the literary and linguistic
origins of the story of Dhul-Qarnayn in the Quran. The Syriac legend,
as it has survived, consists of five distinct manuscripts, including a Syriac Christian religious legend concerning Alexander and a sermon about Alexander ascribed to the Syriac poet-theologian Jacob of Serugh (451–521 AD, also called Mar Jacob), which according to Reinink was composed around 629-636.[20] The Syriac Christian legend concentrates on Alexander's journey to the end of the World, where he constructs the Gates of Alexander to enclose the evil nations of Gog and Magog, while the sermon describes his journey to the Land of Darkness to discover the Water of Life (Fountain of Youth). These legends concerning Alexander are remarkably similar to the story of Dhul-Qarnayn found in the Quran.[21
Except that the muslim consensus is that Alexander, a polythiestic mass murderer, is not Dhul Qarnayn.
Dhul Qarnayn lived in the same time period as Ibrahim.
One of the five Syriac manuscripts, dated to the 18th century,
has a version of the Syriac legend that has been generally dated to
between 629 AD and 636 AD. There is evidence in the legend of "ex eventu knowledge of the Khazar invasion of Armenia in A.D. 629,"[22][23] which suggests that the legend must have been burdened with additions by a redactor sometime around 629 AD. The legend appears to have been composed as propaganda in support of Emperor Heraclius (575–641 AD) shortly after he defeated the Persians in the Byzantine-Sassanid War of 602–628. It is notable that this manuscript fails to mention the Islamic conquest of Jerusalem in 636 AD by Muhammad's (570–632 AD) successor, CaliphUmar (590–644 AD). This fact means that the legend might have been recorded before the "cataclysmic event"` that was the Muslim conquest of Syria and the resulting surrender of Jerusalem in November 636 AD. That the Byzantine–Arab Wars
would have been referenced in the legend, had it been written after 636
AD, is supported by the fact that in 692 AD a Syriac Christian adaption
of the Alexander romance called the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius was indeed written as a response to the Muslim invasions and was falsely attributed to St Methodius (?–311 AD); this Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius equated the evil nations of Gog and Magog with the Muslim invaders and shaped the eschatological imagination of Christendom for centuries.
The manuscripts also contain evidence of lost texts. For example, there is some evidence of a lost pre-Islamic Arabic version of the translation that is thought to have been an intermediary between the Syriac Christian and the Ethiopic Christian translations.[24] There is also evidence that the Syriac translation was not directly based on the Greek recensions but was based on a lost Pahlavi (pre-Islamic Persian) intermediary.[16]
One scholar (Kevin van Bladel)[25] who finds striking similarities between the Quranic verses 18:83-102 and the Syriac legend in support of Emperor Heraclius, dates the work to 629-630 AD or before Muhammad's death, not 629-636 AD.[26]
The Syriac legend matches many details in the five parts of the verses
(Alexander being the two horned one, journey to edge of the world,
punishment of evil doers, Gog and Magog, etc.) and also "makes some
sense of the cryptic Qur'anic story" being 21 pages (in one edition)[26]
not 20 verses. (The sun sets in a fetid poisonous ocean—not
spring—surrounding the earth, Gog and Magog are Huns, etc.) Van Bladel
finds it more plausible that the Syriac legend is the source of the
Quranic verses than vice versa, as the Syriac legend was written before
the Arab conquests when the Hijazi Muslim community was still remote
from and little known to the Mesopotamian site of the legend's creation,
whereas Arabs worked as troops and scouts for during the Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628 and could have been exposed to the legend.
Philologists,
studying ancient Christian legends about Alexander the Great, have come
to conclude that the Quran's stories about Dhul-Qarnayn closely
parallel certain legends about Alexander the Great found in ancient
Hellenistic and Christian writings. There is some numismatic evidence, in the form of ancient coins, to identify the Arabic epithet "Dhul-Qarnayn" with Alexander the Great.[28] Finally, ancient Christian Syriac and Ethiopic manuscripts of the Alexander romance from the Middle East
have been found which closely resemble the story in the Quran. This
leads to the theologically controversial conclusion that Quran refers to
Alexander in the mention of Dhul-Qarnayn.
The story of Dhul-Qarnayn is related in chapter 18 (Surat al-Kahf,
"The Cave") of the Quran. This chapter was revealed to Muhammad when
his tribe, Quraysh, sent two men to discover whether the Jews, with
their superior knowledge of the scriptures, could advise them on whether
Muhammad was a true prophet of God. The rabbis told them to ask
Muhammad about three things, one of them "about a man who travelled and
reached the east and the west of the earth, what was his story". "If he
tells you about these things, then he is a prophet, so follow him, but
if he does not tell you, then he is a man who is making things up, so
deal with him as you see fit."
The verses of the chapter reproduced below show Dhul-Qarnayn
traveling first to the Western edge of the world where he sees the sun
set in a muddy spring, then to the furthest East where he sees it rise
from the ocean, and finally northward to a place in the mountains where
he finds a people oppressed by Gog and Magog:
Dhul-Qarnayn must have been a great ruler whose conquests spread from the East to the West and to the North.
The conquests of Cyrus spread to Syria and Asia Minor in the West and to the Indus in the East, and his kingdom extended to the Caucasus in the North.
Dhul-Qarnayn must be a ruler who constructed a strong wall
across a mountain pass to protect his kingdom from the incursions of
tribes or nations Gog and Magog.
Gog and Magog were the wild tribes of Central Asia who were known by different names, Scythians, Parthians, Tartars, Mongols, and Huns,
who had been making incursions on various kingdoms and empires from
very ancient times. Strong bulwarks had been built in southern regions
of Caucasia, though it has yet to be determined historically whether
these were built by Cyrus.
Dhul-Qarnayn should be a monotheist and a just ruler, since the Quran has stressed these characteristics.
Even his enemies praised Cyrus for his justice, and Ezra
asserts that he was a God-worshiper and a God-fearing king who set free
the Israelites because of his God-worship, and ordered that the Temple of Solomon be rebuilt for the worship of God.
Comments
Same genes, different species
Two of the genes, GTF2I and GTF2IRD1, had previously been linked to social behavior in mice as well as in people with Williams syndrome. In 2009, Uta Francke and her colleagues at Stanford University in California found that mice were unusually eager to socialize when they were missing those two genes. But until Francke saw the new study, she had no idea that the genes she had studied might help explain the behavior of her own dog, a Bernese mountain dog named Minna.
"She walks up to strangers and wants interaction with everybody, just like the Williams kids," said Francke, who has worked with people with Williams syndrome in her career as a medical geneticist. "To think that this is because of the involvement of these genes in some way -- I find that extremely exciting."
The connection between dogs and Williams syndrome will likely ring true for people within the Williams syndrome community as well, said Jocelyn Krebs, a biomedical researcher at the University of Alaska Anchorage who has studied Williams syndrome and was not involved in the new study. Krebs has a son with Williams syndrome, and she sits on the Williams syndrome Association board of trustees, so she knows how friendly people with the condition can be.
"If they had tails, they would wag them," she said.
Roots of domestication
The findings are consistent with current theories of dog domestication. Once, researchers assumed that ancient humans domesticated dogs on purpose, adopting wolf pups and breeding them for useful traits. Biologists Ray and Lorna Coppinger have pioneered a different view, seeing early dogs as scavengers on human trash. According to this theory, shy wolves continued to hunt in the forest, while bolder wolves that could tolerate humans took up residence at village rubbish heaps.
Ray Coppinger himself avoids words like "friendly" when referring to these ancestral dogs. But according to Clive Wynne, a behavioral scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, and one of the new study's authors, sociability could have been a key trait that helped early dogs get access to human scraps. The new study suggests that dogs achieved that friendliness in part through changes to the genes that are equivalent to those affected in people with Williams syndrome.
"Outside of, like, Disney movies, animals all just making friends with each other and being lovey-dovey out in the forest is pretty much a catastrophe," said Wynne. But, he said, "If you have a mutation that makes you more willing to make friends, well then, you're going to get a lot more out of the trash dump."
Wynne can’t say for sure whether the domestication process happened at multiple villages at different times, or if it happened just once, as indicated by another recent study that looked at DNA from ancient dog fossils.
It's too soon to know just how important the genes identified in the study were in dog domestication, cautioned Ray Coppinger, during an interview with Inside Science. But it's possible that they played a pivotal role, not just for dogs, but for other species as well, said Carlos Driscoll, a geneticist who studies cat domestication at the National Institutes of Health in Rockville, Maryland. The next step, said Driscoll, is to test other domestic species, and see whether the same three genes may contribute to tame temperaments in everything from cats to goats.
"The only thing that's common among all domesticates is that they're sociable -- that they get along with people," said Driscoll. "This very strongly suggests that this region and these genes are important in domestication."
"It would not actually be a fake tan, it would be the real thing," one of the team, David Fisher from the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, told The Guardian. "It would just be sunless."
Back in 2006, Fisher and his colleagues discovered that a plant extract called forskolin could produce a cancer-protecting tan in red-haired mice, without being triggered by harmful UV radiation (sunlight).
That was a pretty big deal, because when your red-headed friend complains about going from pale to a straight-up burn when they hit the beach - with no tan in between - they're not just overreacting.
Redheads contain a variant of the MC1R gene, which not only imparts red hair and fair skin, but also messes with a receptor molecule that sits on the surface of skin cells called melanocytes.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/unnatural
"unnatural (adj.)
In non-redheads, this receptor works with the melanocytes to produce dark melanin pigments on the skin in response to UV radiation, but by some cruel twist of fate, the redhead variant doesn't do this, so the skin tends to burn.
When the researchers applied forskolin to the skin of mice that had been genetically engineered to have fair skin and rust-coloured fur - an analogue for red-haired people - it stimulated the production of melanin.
Here's a comparison, where a high dosage of forskolin gave the red-haired mice temporary black skin:
The treated mice were exposed to UV rays, and when compared to untreated red-haired mice, they experienced less sunburn and DNA damage, and were less likely to develop skin cancer tumours.
This is because dark melanin pigment is able to disperse more than 99.9 percent of harmful UV rays absorbed by the skin, so the more you have of it, the better protected your cells are.
But there was one problem. The compound didn't work on humans - our skin is five times thicker than mouse skin, and far better at keeping foreign chemicals out.
Now, a decade later, the researchers have come up with a solution that they think will actually work on us - a different class of compounds that can not only boost the pigmentation process, but also squeeze through the outer layers of our epidermis.
These tiny molecules work by inhibiting SIK (Salt Inducible Kinase) enzymes in the skin, which is like a 'master off switch' for melanin production.
When a strong dose of the compound was tested in red-haired mice, it turned them black within a couple of days, just like the forskolin.
When tested on donated human skin samples, the tanning response could be adjusted based on dosage and frequency of use, and could last for several days without reapplication.
Snub-nosed monkeys are a group of Old World monkeys and make up the entirety of the genus Rhinopithecus. The genus is rare and needs much more research. Some taxonomists group snub-nosed monkeys together with the genus Pygathrix.
Snub-nosed monkeys live in Asia, with a range covering southern China (especially Tibet, Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou) as well as the northern parts of Myanmar.
wildlife of Ethiopia
Le secret de l'histoire naturelle, France ca. 1480-1485
apes
De Natura animalium, Cambrai ca. 1270
The story of Dhul-Qarnayn (in Arabic ذو القرنين, literally "The Two-Horned One", also transliterated as Zul-Qarnain or Zulqarnain), mentioned in the Quran, may be a reference to Alexander III of Macedon (356–323 BC), popularly known as Alexander the Great.[1] Some Western and traditional Muslim scholars identify Alexander the Great as Dhul-Qarnayn (Quran 18:83–94).[2][3] However, some early Muslim scholars believed it to be a reference to a pre-Islamic monarch from Persia or south Arabia,[4] with, according to Maududi, modern Muslim scholarship also leaning in favour of identifying him with Cyrus the Great.[5]
Peter Bietenholz argues that the story of Dhul-Qarnayn has its origins in legends of Alexander the Great current in the Middle East in the early years of the Christian era.[6] According to these legends, the Scythians, the descendants of Gog and Magog, once defeated one of Alexander's generals, upon which Alexander built a wall in the Caucasus mountains to keep them out of civilized lands (the basic elements are found in Flavius Josephus).The scholar Stephen Gero, sharing similar views, inserts that the earliest possible date for the Gog & Magog gate-narrative in this form dates to between 629-636, thus tentatively concluding the syriac Alexander Romance "stricte dictu cannot be considered as a source of the Qur’anic narrative", due to the fact that there is absolute consent among Western[7] and Muslim[8][9] scholars that Surah 18 belongs to the second Meccan Period (615-619).[10] Similar reservations are offered by Brannon Wheeler.The Greek variants of the Alexander romance continued to evolve until, in the 4th century, the Greek legend was translated into Latin by Julius Valerius Alexander Polemius (where it is called the Res gestae Alexandri Magni) and from Latin it spread to all major vernacular languages of Europe in the Middle Ages. Around the same as its translation into Latin, the Greek text was also translated into the Syriac language and from Syriac it spread to eastern cultures and languages as far afield as China and Southeast Asia.[17] The Syriac legend was the source of an Arabic variant called the Qisas Dhul-Qarnayn (Tales of Dhul-Qarnayn)[18] and a Persian variant called the Iskandarnamah (Book of Alexander), as well as Armenian and Ethiopic translations.[19]
The version recorded in Syriac is of particular importance because it was current in the Middle East during the time of the Quran's writing and is regarded as being closely related to the literary and linguistic origins of the story of Dhul-Qarnayn in the Quran. The Syriac legend, as it has survived, consists of five distinct manuscripts, including a Syriac Christian religious legend concerning Alexander and a sermon about Alexander ascribed to the Syriac poet-theologian Jacob of Serugh (451–521 AD, also called Mar Jacob), which according to Reinink was composed around 629-636.[20] The Syriac Christian legend concentrates on Alexander's journey to the end of the World, where he constructs the Gates of Alexander to enclose the evil nations of Gog and Magog, while the sermon describes his journey to the Land of Darkness to discover the Water of Life (Fountain of Youth). These legends concerning Alexander are remarkably similar to the story of Dhul-Qarnayn found in the Quran.[21
One of the five Syriac manuscripts, dated to the 18th century, has a version of the Syriac legend that has been generally dated to between 629 AD and 636 AD. There is evidence in the legend of "ex eventu knowledge of the Khazar invasion of Armenia in A.D. 629,"[22][23] which suggests that the legend must have been burdened with additions by a redactor sometime around 629 AD. The legend appears to have been composed as propaganda in support of Emperor Heraclius (575–641 AD) shortly after he defeated the Persians in the Byzantine-Sassanid War of 602–628. It is notable that this manuscript fails to mention the Islamic conquest of Jerusalem in 636 AD by Muhammad's (570–632 AD) successor, Caliph Umar (590–644 AD). This fact means that the legend might have been recorded before the "cataclysmic event"` that was the Muslim conquest of Syria and the resulting surrender of Jerusalem in November 636 AD. That the Byzantine–Arab Wars would have been referenced in the legend, had it been written after 636 AD, is supported by the fact that in 692 AD a Syriac Christian adaption of the Alexander romance called the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius was indeed written as a response to the Muslim invasions and was falsely attributed to St Methodius (?–311 AD); this Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius equated the evil nations of Gog and Magog with the Muslim invaders and shaped the eschatological imagination of Christendom for centuries.
The manuscripts also contain evidence of lost texts. For example, there is some evidence of a lost pre-Islamic Arabic version of the translation that is thought to have been an intermediary between the Syriac Christian and the Ethiopic Christian translations.[24] There is also evidence that the Syriac translation was not directly based on the Greek recensions but was based on a lost Pahlavi (pre-Islamic Persian) intermediary.[16]
One scholar (Kevin van Bladel)[25] who finds striking similarities between the Quranic verses 18:83-102 and the Syriac legend in support of Emperor Heraclius, dates the work to 629-630 AD or before Muhammad's death, not 629-636 AD.[26] The Syriac legend matches many details in the five parts of the verses (Alexander being the two horned one, journey to edge of the world, punishment of evil doers, Gog and Magog, etc.) and also "makes some sense of the cryptic Qur'anic story" being 21 pages (in one edition)[26] not 20 verses. (The sun sets in a fetid poisonous ocean—not spring—surrounding the earth, Gog and Magog are Huns, etc.) Van Bladel finds it more plausible that the Syriac legend is the source of the Quranic verses than vice versa, as the Syriac legend was written before the Arab conquests when the Hijazi Muslim community was still remote from and little known to the Mesopotamian site of the legend's creation, whereas Arabs worked as troops and scouts for during the Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628 and could have been exposed to the legend.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_the_Great_in_the_Quran
The story of Dhul-Qarnayn is related in chapter 18 (Surat al-Kahf, "The Cave") of the Quran. This chapter was revealed to Muhammad when his tribe, Quraysh, sent two men to discover whether the Jews, with their superior knowledge of the scriptures, could advise them on whether Muhammad was a true prophet of God. The rabbis told them to ask Muhammad about three things, one of them "about a man who travelled and reached the east and the west of the earth, what was his story". "If he tells you about these things, then he is a prophet, so follow him, but if he does not tell you, then he is a man who is making things up, so deal with him as you see fit."
The verses of the chapter reproduced below show Dhul-Qarnayn traveling first to the Western edge of the world where he sees the sun set in a muddy spring, then to the furthest East where he sees it rise from the ocean, and finally northward to a place in the mountains where he finds a people oppressed by Gog and Magog:
Dhul-Qarnayn must have been a great ruler whose conquests spread from the East to the West and to the North.
The conquests of Cyrus spread to Syria and Asia Minor in the West and to the Indus in the East, and his kingdom extended to the Caucasus in the North.
Dhul-Qarnayn must be a ruler who constructed a strong wall across a mountain pass to protect his kingdom from the incursions of tribes or nations Gog and Magog.
Gog and Magog were the wild tribes of Central Asia who were known by different names, Scythians, Parthians, Tartars, Mongols, and Huns, who had been making incursions on various kingdoms and empires from very ancient times. Strong bulwarks had been built in southern regions of Caucasia, though it has yet to be determined historically whether these were built by Cyrus.
Dhul-Qarnayn should be a monotheist and a just ruler, since the Quran has stressed these characteristics.
Even his enemies praised Cyrus for his justice, and Ezra asserts that he was a God-worshiper and a God-fearing king who set free the Israelites because of his God-worship, and ordered that the Temple of Solomon be rebuilt for the worship of God.