Phoenician culture spread mainly through cultural exchange

The Phoenician culture emerged in the Bronze Age city-states of the Levant, developing prominent innovations such as the first alphabet (from which many present-day writing systems derive). By the early first millennium BCE, Phoenician cities had established a vast maritime network of trading posts as far as Iberia, spreading their culture, religion, and language throughout the central and western Mediterranean.

By the 6th 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.

Within the framework of the Max Planck-Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean, co-directed by Johannes Krause, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and Michael McCormick of Harvard University, an international team of researchers has now presented a study on the genetic history of these ancient Mediterranean civilizations.

New perspective on the spread of Phoenician culture

The new study aimed to use 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. This was made possible 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, who was a post-doctoral scientist at Harvard University when he began this research, and is now 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."

Ancient DNA reveals cosmopolitan nature of Punic world

The results underscore the Punic world's cosmopolitan nature. Individuals with North African ancestry lived next to and intermingled with a majority of people of mainly Sicilian-Aegean ancestry in all sampled Punic sites, including Carthage. Moreover, genetic networks across the Mediterranean suggest that shared demographic processes -- such as trade, intermarriage, and population mixing -- played a critical role in shaping these communities. The researchers even found a pair of close relatives (ca. second cousins) bridging the Mediterranean, one buried in a North African Punic site and one in Sicily.

"These findings reinforce the idea that ancient Mediterranean societies were deeply interconnected, with people moving and mixing across often large geographic distances," says Ilan Gronau, a professor of Computer Science at Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel, who co-led the work. He adds: "Such studies highlight the power of ancient DNA in its ability to shed light on the ancestry and mobility of historical populations for which we have relatively sparse direct historical records."