bar021 byzantine 23andme format

The Byzantines were the continuation of the Eastern Roman Empire, which emerged after the administrative division of the Roman Empire into eastern and western halves in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries CE. The Emperor Diocletian first divided the empire in 285 CE to make governance more efficient, and later Emperor Constantine the Great established Constantinople as the new imperial capital in 330 CE, transforming the small Greek city of Byzantium into the political and cultural center of the eastern realm.

Initially, the Byzantines saw themselves not as a separate civilization but as Romans. The empire’s official name was never “Byzantine” — that term was created much later by Western historians — but rather the Roman Empire or Basileia Rhomaion. Greek gradually replaced Latin as the main language of administration and culture by the 7th century, but the state’s institutions, laws, and imperial ideology were direct continuations of ancient Rome.

The Byzantines preserved Roman law, most famously through Justinian I’s Codex Justinianus, which became the foundation of much of European legal tradition. They also maintained the Roman system of bureaucracy, taxation, and the professional army, adapting it to the new realities of medieval warfare and trade.

A 2025 study named “Carbon and Nitrogen Isotopic Ratios and Ancient DNA Evidence from Barcın Höyük and Kadıkalesi Anaia” focuses on DNA data from human remains from Western Turkey dating to the Byzantine period. For this video, I have used publicly accessible data to explore one such genome. The sample is a male, carrying the Middle Eastern T “y” lineage together with the European mitochondrial lineage U5a.