A recent study published in the journal Nature revealed that while the ancient Phoenician civilization spread its culture widely across the Mediterranean, it did not spread its DNA. An international team of researchers, co-directed by Johannes Krause and Michael McCormick, presented these findings after analyzing the genetic history of ancient Mediterranean civilizations.
The Phoenician civilization emerged more than 3,000 years ago in the Bronze Age city-states of the Levant, centered around what is now Lebanon, before expanding across the Mediterranean Sea. The Phoenicians developed innovations such as the first alphabet, from which many present-day writing systems derive, and shared languages recorded with this alphabet that was a precursor to Greek and Latin letters.
By the early first millennium BCE, Phoenician cities had established a maritime network of trading posts as far as Iberia, sharing religious practices and maritime trading economies. By the sixth century BCE, Carthage, a Phoenician coastal colony in what is now Tunisia, had risen to dominate the region, and Phoenician culture thrived farther west until its destruction in 146 BCE.
The 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. The researchers sequenced and analyzed 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.
Lead author Harald Ringbauer, who began this research as a post-doctoral scientist at Harvard University and is now a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, revealed an unexpected result. “We find surprisingly little direct genetic contribution from Levantine Phoenicians to western and central Mediterranean Punic populations,” said Ringbauer. “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 found that Punic sites were home to people with different ancestry profiles. “We observe a genetic profile in the Punic world that was extraordinarily heterogeneous,” said David Reich. He added, “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.”
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. This mixture of ancestries among Punic people is probably the result of a regular influx of diverse people connected by a “Mediterranean highway” maintained by trade between Phoenician outposts, according to Ringbauer.
Despite the widespread Phoenician culture, Punic people’s genomes did not always resemble those of local populations, such as those in Sardinia and Ibiza. To their surprise, people from Mediterranean outposts of Phoenician culture, also known as Punic people, shared no ancestry with ancient Middle Easterners, even those from sites linked to Phoenicians and their forebears, the Canaanites. Instead, Punic people shared an ancestry profile resembling those of ancient inhabitants of Greece and Sicily.
Ringbauer pondered, “How can there be such a disconnect? Does this mean Phoenician culture was like a franchise that others could adopt? That’s one for the archaeologists.” He also wondered why diverse Mediterranean people adopted Phoenician culture instead of sticking to their existing practices.
Over time, North African ancestry entered the mix among Punic people, reflecting the rise of Carthage after 500 BCE. “The absence of Middle Eastern ancestry in Punic people does not surprise me,” said Pierre Zalloua, a geneticist at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. He added, “The Phoenicians were a culture of integration and assimilation. They settled where they sailed.”
“The results underscore the Punic world’s cosmopolitan nature,” said Ilan Gronau, a professor of Computer Science at Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel, who co-led the work. “These findings reinforce the idea that ancient Mediterranean societies were deeply interconnected, with people moving and mixing across often large geographic distances,” he added. “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.”
The article was written with the assistance of a news analysis system.
