Carthaginians, Ancient Rome’s Infamous Enemies, Are Not Exactly Who Scholars Thought They Were, Ancestry Study Suggests
DNA reveals that the people of Carthage, a powerful independent colony founded by the Phoenicians, had little genetic similarity to their counterparts in the Levant
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The Phoenician culture emerged around 3,100 years ago from coastal Mediterranean sites in modern-day Lebanon, Syria and Israel, also known as the Levant. Phoenicians gave the world its first alphabet and were formidable sea merchants and colonizers, establishing city-states throughout the central and western Mediterranean. New research, however, suggests they were much more successful at exporting their trade, culture, language and religion than their genes.
Scientists examined ancient DNA to trace the ancestry of the people of Carthage, a powerful Phoenician colony in modern-day Tunisia and one of ancient Rome’s most formidable enemies. Carthaginians were known as “Punic people” to the Romans, and the two civilizations clashed in the Punic Wars—during which the Carthaginian general Hannibal famously crossed the Alps.
Although the Carthaginians were part of the Phoenician culture, the new study found they were much more diverse and more genetically distinct from their Levantine counterparts than scholars had previously assumed. The findings, published last week in the journal Nature, suggest the Phoenicians didn’t spread their culture through mass migration, but rather through cultural assimilation.
“They preserved Phoenician culture, language, religion and their commercial lifestyle,” David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard University and a co-author of the study, tells the New York Times’ Franz Lidz, “but passed it to people of biologically different ancestry with whom they mixed after they arrived in these regions.”
To study the ancestry of these ancient civilizations, researchers sequenced and analyzed around 200 human genomes from 14 Phoenician and Punic archaeological sites, including in the Levant, Iberia, North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia and Ibiza.
Phoenician cities and their independent colonies made up more of a federation than a country or empire. Nevertheless, the researchers were surprised by the “little direct genetic contribution from Levantine Phoenicians to western and central Mediterranean Punic populations,” says lead author Harald Ringbauer, now a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in a statement.
The Punic people, they found, had diverse DNA and almost no Levantine ancestors. The largest contribution came from people genetically similar to those in modern-day Sicily and Greece, and North African ancestry appeared later, likely as Carthage rose to power. Notably, Ringbauer and his colleagues identified a pair of individuals that were likely second cousins—one in a North African Punic site and one in Sicily.
“Our results mean that people of non-Levantine ancestries must have adopted Levantine ‘Phoenician’ culture (including language and religion). It also highlights that Phoenician culture was open to integrating outsiders,” Ringbauer tells ZME Science’s Tibi Puiu. “One hypothesis is that over the centuries since the initial foundation of the Phoenician colonies, a process of dynamic assimilation and integration completely transferred the Punic people’s ancestry profile.”
Phoenician colonies likely saw regular arrivals of diverse people due to the trade networks, which helped keep their genetic profile so heterogeneous.
Pierre Zalloua, a geneticist at Khalifa University who did not participate in the study, tells Nature’s Ewen Callaway that the findings make sense, because “Phoenicians were a culture of integration and assimilation,” and “they settled where they sailed.”
The scientists liken the phenomenon to corporate franchises. “When a company expands, it doesn’t necessarily send its people into a new place; a local person buys the franchise and adopts the entire cultural complex, even though they are not derived from it,” Reich explains to Haaretz’s Ariel David. “This seems to be what we are seeing.”
Eve MacDonald, a Cardiff University historian who was not involved in the study, points out that “today, we are so much more than just our genes, and identity cannot be reduced to a singularity,” to the New York Times. “What made someone Carthaginian would have been many things, including a link to Carthage itself, its myths, stories, cultures and families.”
Ancient Rome infamously destroyed Carthage in 146 B.C.E. during the Third Punic War. As legend has it, the Romans sowed Carthage’s fields with salt to prevent future agriculture and definitively wipe their enemy from the Earth.
