New Research

Dead Bodies Filled a Mass Grave When the First Plague Pandemic Struck This Early Medieval City. New Research Explores the Identity of the Victims

Researchers analyzed isotopes and DNA in the teeth of remains found in a mass grave from the Plague of Justinian, which swept through the Byzantine Empire

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

May 1, 2026

Share

Copy linkEmailSMSFacebookXRedditLinkedInBlueskyPrint

Add as preferred source

In the year 541 C.E., a terrible sickness swept through the Byzantine Empire. Now known as the Plague of Justinian, after the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, the pandemic faded and resurged for two centuries, killing tens of millions of people. It was the first documented outbreak of plague.

A new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science reveals details about the plague victims. Lessons about how their society worked and who was most vulnerable when disaster struck are still relevant to our modern health crises, the researchers say.

In the sixth century C.E., the Byzantine Empire—the eastern half of the Roman Empire—covered most Mediterranean lands, including North Africa, southern Europe and Asia Minor. One of the plague’s epicenters was the city of Jerash, a crossroads of trade in present-day Jordan. About half the city’s 20,000 people died, and quickly.

“Death came in some cases immediately, in others after many days,” wrote the sixth-century C.E. historian Procopius, who witnessed the plague in Byzantium (now Istanbul). “And with some the body broke out with black pustules about as large as a lentil and these did not survive even one day, but all succumbed immediately. With many also a vomiting of blood ensued without visible cause and straightway brought death.”

In Jerash, as in other cities, the dead piled up so fast that citizens dispensed with once-sacred funerary rituals. The city’s hippodrome, an arena that had once hosted chariot races, was by then a ceramics and textiles factory. When the plague hit, it became a mass grave.

“That was filled within days—hundreds of bodies,” Rays Jiang, a geneticist at the University of South Florida, tells All Things Considered’s Durrie Bouscaren. “And there’s no ceremony. There’s no grave goods. It’s a bare minimum to get the body disposed of and away from the city.”

Last year, Jiang’s team identified the exact bacteria that caused the Plague of Justinian: Yersinia pestis. Recently, Jiang and fellow researchers followed that work up with new analysis of human remains excavated from Jerash’s mass grave.

“The earlier stories identified the plague organism,” Jiang says in a statement from the university. “The Jerash site turns that genetic signal into a human story about who died and how a city experienced a crisis.”

The hippodrome was excavated back in the 1990s, when archaeologists unearthed more than 200 skeletons. The remains date to the mid-sixth and early seventh centuries C.E.—the plague’s first wave. As Jiang tells the Guardian’s Richard Luscombe, the skeletons belong to men and women, old people and youths, “people in their prime, and teenagers.”

Isotopes in the teeth provided information about the victims’ diets. Per the study, the majority ate lots of wheat and barley, but oxygen in their enamel betrayed “diverse childhood water ecologies.” Some drank “from wells, some from cisterns, some from mountain streams,” Jiang tells All Things Considered. That means many of the dead likely originally came to the city from other places, perhaps to work, to trade or because they were forced to travel there.

“At that time, there were slaves, mercenaries, all sorts of people, and our data is consistent with this being a transient population,” Jiang tells the Guardian. DNA extracted from the teeth allowed researchers to trace the victims’ ancestry back to central Africa, Eastern Europe, modern-day Turkey and other regions.

Study co-author Karen Hendrix, a University of Sydney archaeologist, tells All Things Considered that Jerash was “well-known from documented accounts to be a Roman Byzantine urban center embedded in a very vibrant regional trade network.” The city’s cosmopolitan, commercial standing made it more vulnerable to a spreading disease.

“Immigrants would come to the city looking for employment, and then the pandemic hits,” Nükhet Varlik, a historian at Rutgers University, tells All Things Considered. “They’re among the most vulnerable populations.”

Yet, she adds, the genetic diversity of Jerash’s plague victims also shows “a universal experience for humanity.” Natives and immigrants were caught up together in the tragedy.

Plague 101 | National Geographic

Watch on

The bodies of the hippodrome grave contain a “single, uniform strain of Yersinia pestis, confirming a synchronous epidemic event,” the new study says. In other words, the outbreak happened so fast that these hundreds of people died before the bacteria could even mutate.

According to the study, Jerash’s mass grave can now be securely identified as the oldest “catastrophic plague burial in the Near East.” It became one of many. In Byzantium, humongous pits were dug, and when they overflowed, bodies were piled into the towers of the city walls. They sent “an evil stench” blowing through the city, Procopius wrote. When the towers were full, bodies were loaded onto wooden ships, which were set adrift and aflame.

The worst of the Justinian plague was over by the end of the sixth century C.E., but outbreaks continued through the mid-eighth century. Yersinia pestis struck again in the 1300s, this time bringing the Black Death to Western Europe, where people had to dig their own grim “plague pits.”

Sonja Anderson | Read More

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in Chicago.