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Ancestry populations · Classical Antiquity

Late Antique Mount Lebanon

The villagers of Mount Lebanon in the late Roman, Byzantine and early Islamic centuries, heirs to the Levant's Bronze Age Canaanite ancestry. One of the 50 curated source populations in the Classical Antiquity era of Ancient Ancestry, Ancestrify's qpAdm analysis.

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Who they were

Artistic interpretation of the Late Antique Mount Lebanon (AI-generated artwork, not documentary evidence)
Period
430 to 760 AD
Era in the analysis
Classical Antiquity
Region
Mount Lebanon
Role in the model
Source (left) population, a reference qpAdm tests against

Mount Lebanon in Late Antiquity was a country of hill villages above the cities of the coast, under Byzantine rule and, from the 630s, under the first Arab caliphates. This source is built from two places in the mountains: the family tombs of Ej-Jaouze, high in the hills east of Beirut, and Chhim in the Chouf, a stone village above the coast between Beirut and Sidon with a Roman temple, a Byzantine church and the olive presses that made its living. Their genomes were published by Antonio et al. (2024) and dated directly by radiocarbon to between about AD 430 and 760.

Its people farmed terraced slopes, pressed olive oil for the towns of the coast and kept goats and sheep, and by this time most were Christians who spoke Aramaic at home, with Greek the language of the towns. Ancient genomes from Lebanon spanning four thousand years show the people of the coast and the mountains to be largely continuous with the Bronze Age Canaanites, with later admixture adding to that base rather than replacing it (Haber et al. 2017; Haber et al. 2020). That long local ancestry is still the largest part of the heritage of present-day Lebanese (Haber et al. 2017).

In Ancient Ancestry, Ancestrify's qpAdm analysis, Late Antique Mount Lebanon is a source in the "Classical Antiquity" era. The report shows its weight with a standard error and a Z-score, so you can see not only how much of the model it carries but how confidently that share is separated from zero, and a model that cannot support it is rejected rather than published. It is the era's Levantine reference from the mountains, beside the Eastern Mediterranean and Southern Levant sources of the same centuries and a thousand years after the Phoenician source of the same coast; read its weight together with theirs, since the model may divide one Levantine signal among them.

Y haplogroups J1, J2 and E1b1b, and mtDNA H, K, J and HV, are common in the region's populations. A haplogroup alone is never evidence of a share.

In your report

The villagers of Mount Lebanon in Late Antiquity, from the late Roman and Byzantine centuries into the first century of Arab rule, about 430 to 760 AD. They are known from two places in the hills: the family tombs of Ej-Jaouze, high in the mountains east of Beirut, and Chhim in the Chouf, a stone village above the coast between Beirut and Sidon with a Roman temple, a Byzantine church and the olive presses that made its living. They farmed the mountain slopes, pressed olive oil for the towns of the coast, kept goats and sheep and buried their dead together in family tombs. By this time most of them were Christians who spoke Aramaic at home, while Greek was spoken in the towns. Their ancestry is largely the long local inheritance of the Levant, reaching back to the Bronze Age Canaanites, and the Lebanese of today still carry much of it. This is the source a Levantine, Cypriot or eastern Mediterranean genome is tested against for its Late Antique Levantine share, a thousand years after the Phoenicians of the same coast.

Artwork is an AI-generated artistic interpretation informed by the archaeological record, not documentary evidence.

Where this population sits in the model

Ancient Ancestry, our qpAdm analysis, models your genome once per era. The Classical Antiquity era has 50 curated source populations, and Late Antique Mount Lebanon is one of them: every candidate model for that era is a combination of these sources, tested against a fixed set of outgroup populations, and only a model that passes the statistical fit check is published, with a p-value and a standard error on every proportion.

A reference, not a verdict: every population on this page is a source the model tests your genome against, a well-sampled point in ancient genetic space that a mixture of ancestries can be expressed in terms of. A weight on it means your genome is well described as partly resembling those people; it is never a statement that they, specifically, were your ancestors, and a population that fits well is not the only one that could.

Read how qpAdm works on the Ancient Ancestry page, or the definitions in the glossary.

Model it yourself for free

The Ancestrify Lab runs in your browser, with no account. Paste a Global25 row into an admixture calculator that covers the Classical Antiquity era, rank the closest ancient populations in the distance tool, or run f4, qpWave and qpAdm on the public panel in the AdmixTools 2 workbench. These are Global25 fits and exploratory statistics, not the formal qpAdm model of Ancient Ancestry.

Questions

  • Who were the Late Antique Mount Lebanon (430 to 760 AD)?

    Late Antique Mount Lebanon is one of the 50 curated source populations in the Classical Antiquity era of Ancient Ancestry, Ancestrify's qpAdm analysis: a group of published genomes pooled as a single reference the model can test your genome against. These are ancient individuals from one archaeological context wherever the record holds them, and present-day genomes standing in where it does not, which the description on this page says.

  • Does Late Antique Mount Lebanon in my result mean they were my ancestors?

    No. A source population is a reference the model tests against, never a statement about who your ancestors were. A coefficient on this source means the ancestry those burials represent helps explain your genome to within statistical noise: similar ancestry composition, not descent from those individuals. Ancestrify never claims a population is your ancestor.

  • What does a Late Antique Mount Lebanon percentage in a qpAdm model mean?

    qpAdm estimates the mixture proportions that best explain your genome as a combination of the chosen sources, given a fixed set of outgroup (right) populations, and reports a p-value for whether the model is statistically acceptable together with a standard error for every proportion. The percentage is that estimated share, with its uncertainty published beside it.

  • How do I get a qpAdm model that uses Late Antique Mount Lebanon?

    Order Ancient Ancestry, Ancestrify's qpAdm analysis (€29.99, one-time), and upload the raw file you already have from a consumer test. Your genome is merged into the AADR reference panel and modelled across both eras; each era's model is built from that era's source populations, so a model for the Classical Antiquity era draws on Late Antique Mount Lebanon where it improves the fit.

  • Can I model Late Antique Mount Lebanon ancestry for free first?

    Yes. The Ancestrify Lab runs Global25 admixture calculators, a nearest-populations distance tool and an AdmixTools 2 workbench in your browser with no account, and several calculators cover the Classical Antiquity era. Those are G25 fits, not formal qpAdm models. Ancient Ancestry, the paid analysis, is the one with a p-value.

More populations from the Classical Antiquity era

Browse the full directory of source populations, or continue with another population from the same era:

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