The Phoenicians were a confederation of maritime traders who emerged from the chaos of the Levant about 3,100 years ago and developed the most extensive commercial network in antiquity. Despite their contributions — which included boatbuilding, navigation, town planning and, perhaps most significantly, an alphabet — no literature and few written records survived, beyond funerary inscriptions.
The most powerful and prosperous of the Phoenicians’ independent city-states was Carthage, founded around the ninth century B.C. in what is now Tunisia. The Carthaginians, also known as the Punic people, established an empire that eventually extended across northeastern Africa and into the south of modern-day Spain. Then came the rivalry with Rome and the three Punic Wars, which ended in 146 B.C. after a brutal siege as the Romans razed Carthage, destroyed its libraries and, tradition says, sowed its ground with salt.
For more than 2,000 years, the general assumption was that the Carthaginians derived from the Levant, specifically Canaan, the source of their language and religion. But an eight-year study published on Wednesday in Nature suggests that, from the sixth to the second centuries B.C., Levantine Phoenicians made only a negligible genetic contribution to Punic colonies.
“They preserved Phoenician culture, language, religion and their commercial lifestyle,” said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard whose lab generated the data, “but passed it to people of biologically different ancestry with whom they mixed after they arrived in these regions.”
An international research team analyzed the degraded DNA from the remains of 210 individuals, including 196 from 14 sites traditionally identified as Phoenician and Punic in the Levant, North Africa, Iberia, Sicily, Sardinia and Ibiza. The study concluded that the Phoenicians did not intermingle equally with all of the people they met. “They had little DNA from Sardinians, Iberians or even North Africans,” Dr. Reich said. Only three of the 103 people whose bones were carbon-dated had substantial Levantine heritage, and those three — one from Sardinia, two from Sicily — may have been immigrants who arrived during the Roman period that followed the Third Punic War.
Overwhelmingly, the main ancestry of the Phoenicians studied was Greek; these were most likely people whom the Phoenicians encountered and mixed with in Sicily, where Greek and Phoenician colonies existed side by side. Dalit Regev, an archaeologist at the Israel Antiquities Authority who collaborated on the paper, said the research showed that the restless mobility of seafaring Aegean men and women and their descendants powered the expansion not only of the Greeks but of the Phoenicians, too.
Before 400 B.C., Phoenicians from the western Mediterranean who lived in North Africa had fairly simple genetic profiles: only individuals who died in North Africa had North African ancestry. After 400 B.C., traces of North African ancestry turn up in limited measure in the bones of Phoenicians unearthed in Sicily, Sardinia and Iberia. According to the authors, that may reflect the growing influence of Carthage.
On the other hand, Dr. Reich said, contemporaneous Greek colonists did not integrate with the local peoples; DNA from Empuries in Spain or Himera in Sicily suggests that they kept to themselves. “Staying culturally Greek in these places meant sticking to yourself, and not incorporating outsiders into your growing communities,” he said.
In the foundational myth of Carthage that appears in Virgil’s “Aeneid,” the settlement was founded by the fugitive princess Dido, who acquired land from a local Berber ruler. Dexter Hoyos, the author of several books on Carthage and on its greatest general, Hannibal, said that nothing in the accounts of Greek and Roman historians indicated a steady post-settlement flow of migrants from the city-state’s eastern Mediterranean homeland.
Phoenicians no doubt traveled to and from Carthage, he said, and over the six or seven centuries of its Punic life many probably relocated there and had families, but they could not have amounted to more than a tiny fraction of the population. “Certainly there’s no evidence of a regular supply of Phoenician women to become male colonists’ wives,” Dr. Hoyos said.
From the start, he proposed, both male and female settlers found partners in the surrounding regions. “We know of a few marriages between Carthaginian nobles — two of whom were Hannibal’s sisters — with princes of the Numidian peoples to the west of Carthaginian-controlled territory,” he said.
Besides aligning with existing theories, the new findings point to a demographic shift around the sixth century B.C., when Carthaginians adopted a new dialect (Punic) and the dominant form of burial changed from cremation to interment.
“The genetic data make it clear that these cultural changes accompanied a profound change in the population,” Dr. Reich said. A goal for future research, he added, should be to better understand the nature of that change, integrating the genetic, archaeological and historical evidence.
The relatively small sample size of the new study makes generalization difficult, said Eve MacDonald, a historian at Cardiff University and author of the forthcoming “Carthage: A New History of an Ancient Empire,” who was not involved with the project. “But the paper shows us how we need to broaden our understanding of the ancient worlds beyond simplistic narratives of us and them, or Roman and Carthaginian,” she said.
For Dr. MacDonald, the results prove that being Carthaginian was not a specific genetic marker and underscore the complexity of the city-state and its people. “Today, we are so much more than just our genes, and identity cannot be reduced to a singularity,” she said. “What made someone Carthaginian would have been many things, including a link to Carthage itself, its myths, stories, cultures and families.”
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