Long before Rome rose from its seven hills, before Caesar crossed the Rubicon, there was Carthage — the other majestic, maritime, and mercantile great nation of the ancient Mediterranean. Nestled along the sun-drenched shores of what is now Tunisia, the mighty empire of Carthage first began as a humble Phoenician outpost.
The Phoenicians were the consummate sailors of the ancient Mediterranean, a Semitic people from the Levant, whose main cities — Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos — thrived on trade and seafaring. Around the 9th century BCE, perhaps a few decades before the fabled founding of Rome, a group of Tyrian settlers set sail westward.
Legend has it that Carthage was founded by Queen Elissa — better known to the Greeks and Romans as Dido. Fleeing political strife in Tyre, Dido led her people across the sea to the North African coast. There, the local Berber ruler told her she could have as much land as could be covered by a bull’s hide. Dido, clever and resourceful, cut the hide into thin strips and encircled an entire hill—Byrsa, the heart of Carthage.
From that hilltop, the city flourished. It became a hub of trade, connecting the riches of Africa, Iberia, and the eastern Mediterranean. The Carthaginians inherited the Phoenician script, worshiped the same gods (Baal, Tanit, and Melqart), and retained their mother tongue for centuries.
It sounds like the Carthagians were a chip off the old Phoenician block, which makes a new study out today in Nature all the more shocking.
Phoenician Secrets
When scientists analyzed the genomes of 210 ancient individuals from across the Mediterranean, across 14 sites stretching from Israel to Spain, they were startled to find that “Levantine Phoenicians made little genetic contribution to Punic settlements in the central and western Mediterranean.”
Instead, the people buried in Punic cities between the sixth and second centuries BCE carried DNA that was overwhelmingly local. Their ancestry pointed not to Tyre or Sidon, but to Sicily, the Aegean, and North Africa. Even Carthage — perhaps the most iconic of Phoenician-founded cities — was populated mainly by people with Sicilian–Aegean ancestry, not Levantine.
Only three individuals from Punic sites — two in Sicily and one in Sardinia — had any substantial Levantine ancestry. And those, the researchers note, may have arrived during the later Roman period.
“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. 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,” Harald Ringbauer from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology told ZME Science.
Seafaring Culture, Local Genes
The Phoenicians were legendary sailors. They established trading posts across the Mediterranean, spreading their alphabet and iconography from Lebanon to Spain. But this genetic study suggests their westward influence was more about ideas than people.
Why the disconnect between culture and genes?
At least part of the answer lies in the cremation practices of early Phoenician settlers. Like the Romans, Carthaginians commonly cremated their dead, destroying DNA in the process. But after cremation waned after 600 BCE, new groups buried their dead in ways that preserved DNA — and those groups were not of Levantine origin.
In fact, after 400 BCE, a different genetic pattern emerged: the rise of North African ancestry. This ancestry, which the team modeled using an Iron Age individual from inland Algeria, began to appear in Punic sites across Sardinia and Iberia. Still, even in North Africa, it remained a minority. Most individuals continued to trace their roots to Sicily and the Aegean.
Genetic variation within Punic sites was actually strikingly high. “In each sampled Punic site, most males have differing Y haplogroups,” the study states. No single lineage dominated. Instead, haplogroups common across Europe, North Africa, and the Near East mingled in Punic communities.
The researchers even identified long genetic segments shared between individuals separated by hundreds of kilometers — some by the Mediterranean itself. In one case, two fifth-to-seventh-degree relatives were buried in Kerkouane (North Africa) and Birgi (Sicily), suggesting frequent travel and familial ties across the sea.
Even more intimate were the tombs where multiple close relatives were interred. In Villaricos, Spain, the remains of five individuals revealed signs of endogamy — mating between cousins or other close kin. Their genes were typical of Punic ancestry but tightly clustered, indicating a close-knit, intermating group.
Still, the researchers caution against drawing simple conclusions. While some communities practiced close-kin unions, others — like those in Kerkouane and Tharros — showed signs of intermarriage across diverse ancestries.
Culture Without Colonists
So what does this tell us about colonization in the ancient world?
Ringbauer states, “Our work serves as an important example of how cultural transmission can be largely decoupled from actual demographic movement.” In the case of the Phoenician-Punic world, cultural expansion occurred without significant gene flow from the original Levantine population.
The contrast with Greek colonialism is telling. “There is emerging evidence that the contemporaneous Greek colonialism… fundamentally worked differently, with people mainly of Greek ancestry inhabiting Greek colonial sites,” Ringbauer explained.
The Punic model was not about transplanting populations. It was about transmitting ideas — and letting others run with them. At least that’s what the ancient DNA tells us so far.
The Punic people were not a monoculture, nor were they merely Phoenicians in exile. They were shaped by trade, war, colonization, and local interactions. Their shared identity emerged not from bloodlines, but from the adoption of a common cultural toolkit — language, religion, architecture — infused with local flavors.
“We found that the Punic world was unexpectedly ‘interconnected.’ Punic sites over a vast geographic distance shared the same diverse ancestry profiles, and in several cases, we even found relatives across sites. This highlights how mobile these people were, and how in the maritime Phoenician-Punic civilization, people regularly moved large distances,” said Ringbauer.
