Carthage and Phoenicia

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Carthage and Phoenicia

By the sixth century BCE, Carthage, a Phoenician coastal colony in what is now Tunisia, had risen to dominate this region. These culturally Phoenician communities associated with or ruled by Carthage became known as "Punic" by the Romans. The Carthaginian empire left its mark in history, particularly well-known for the three large-scale "Punic Wars" with the rising Roman Republic, including the Carthaginian general Hannibal's surprise campaign to cross the Alps.

An international team of researchers has now presented a study on the genetic history of these ancient Mediterranean civilizations.
The work is published in the journal Nature.

The new study used ancient DNA to characterize Punic people's ancestry and look for genetic links between them and Levantine Phoenicians, with whom they share a common culture and language by sequencing and analyzing a large sample of genomes from human remains buried in 14 Phoenician and Punic archaeological sites spanning the Levant, North Africa, Iberia, and the Mediterranean islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Ibiza.

The researchers revealed an unexpected result. "We find surprisingly little direct genetic contribution from Levantine Phoenicians to western and central Mediterranean Punic populations," says lead author Harald Ringbauer, a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

"This provides a new perspective on how Phoenician culture spread—not through large-scale mass migration, but through a dynamic process of cultural transmission and assimilation."

The study highlights that Punic sites were home to people with vastly different ancestry profiles. "We observe a genetic profile in the Punic world that was extraordinarily heterogeneous," says David Reich, a professor of Genetics and Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University who co-led the work.

"At each site, people were highly variable in their ancestry, with the largest genetic source being people similar to contemporary people of Sicily and the Aegean, and many people with significant North African-associated ancestry as well."

They even found second cousins who lived across the sea from each other.

This is fascinating stuff that raises a lot of eyebrows. And questions. Accuracy is one. Cultures are dynamic, graves are not.