A new DNA study is changing what we thought we knew about one of the ancient world’s great civilizations—the Phoenicians and their descendants, the Punic people.
Long believed to have spread across the Mediterranean through large migrations, new evidence shows that their culture may have traveled mainly through trade, contact, and shared ideas, rather than people physically moving from place to place.
The Phoenician civilization began in the Bronze Age in the area now known as Lebanon and parts of Syria and Israel.
They’re best known for developing the world’s first alphabet, which became the foundation for many modern writing systems.
By the first millennium BCE, the Phoenicians had set up trading posts and colonies all over the Mediterranean, including in places like Spain, Sicily, and North Africa.
The most powerful of these colonies was Carthage, in modern-day Tunisia. By the sixth century BCE, Carthage had become a dominant force in the region. The Romans later called these Carthaginian people “Punic.”
The Punic world is famous for events like the Punic Wars, especially the one where the general Hannibal famously led elephants over the Alps to battle Rome.
Now, thanks to a study led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Harvard University, scientists have looked into the DNA of people buried at 14 ancient Phoenician and Punic sites.
These sites included locations in the Levant, North Africa, Spain, and Mediterranean islands like Sardinia and Ibiza. The goal was to find out if the Punic people were direct descendants of the original Phoenicians from the East.
To their surprise, the researchers found that there was not much direct genetic connection between the original Phoenicians from the Levant and the Punic people living in the western Mediterranean.
Instead, the people buried at these sites had very mixed ancestry. Some had genetic links to North Africa, others to Sicily and the Aegean region, and many had a combination of both.
This means that Phoenician culture likely spread through contact, trade, and cultural exchange rather than through people relocating in large numbers. In fact, the genetic diversity was so great that the team even discovered two people—likely second cousins—buried on opposite sides of the Mediterranean, one in Sicily and one in North Africa.
These findings suggest that ancient Mediterranean societies were highly connected and that people, goods, and ideas moved freely across the sea.
The study shows the power of ancient DNA to fill in the gaps where written history is missing and gives us a clearer picture of how cultures evolved and interacted in the past.
