BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Who Were the Carthaginians?

DNA study reveals surprising results

For much of the first millennium BCE, the Carthaginian merchant empire dominated large swaths of the Mediterranean. But who were the Carthaginians? Carthage, located near the modern Tunisian capital of Tunis, began as one of many Phoenician trading colonies. The city’s Phoenician origins even led its inhabitants and language to be identified as Punic in Roman sources. However, a large-scale genetic study, published in the journal Nature, has revealed a startling truth about the Carthaginians: very few had any genetic link to the Phoenician homeland in the coastal Levant. So, where did they come from?

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Identifying a People

Known for their maritime prowess, the Phoenicians established trading colonies throughout the Mediterranean during the first millennium BCE, and while the original Levantine Phoenician city-states slowly waned in power and influence after coming under Assyrian control, their colonies continued to rule the seas. Despite the cultural continuity between Phoenicia and Carthage, it remains uncertain how closely related the Carthaginians were to their Phoenician predecessors. To tackle the question of who were the Carthaginians, a team of 70 scholars and scientists carried out the largest genetic study ever undertaken on the remains of individuals from Carthaginian sites. They examined the remains of nearly 400 individuals and conducted DNA analysis on around 200 who lived in the sixth through third centuries BCE.

Although previous genetic studies had shown Phoenicians to be closely related to other Levantine peoples, the large-scale study on the Carthaginians revealed something very different. The most common genetic ancestry was not from the Levant, but rather from Sicily and the Aegean. A much smaller portion had North Africa ancestry, and only a few had links to the Levant or the Iberian Peninsula. It is worth noting, however, that all of the analyzed samples dated to the sixth century BCE or later, a few hundred years after the establishment of many of the Phoenician trading colonies, when there was a marked shift from cremation to inhumation burial practices.

So, how could the Carthaginians have been culturally Phoenician but genetically Sicilian-Aegean? One of the best explanations involves not Phoenician but Greek colonies, as many Phoenician colonies were founded close to Greek settlements across Sicily and North Africa. While the Phoenician colonies would have been genetically Levantine when they were founded, over time they incorporated large numbers of individuals who were of Greek and Sicilian descent. While the Phoenician culture won out, Phoenician genetics did not.

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The genetic origin of the Carthaginians was not the team’s only intriguing discovery. First, they found that the Carthaginians were genetically diverse, with many different streams of descent identified across Punic sites. However, there was not a large amount of diversity between sites. In other words, while Carthaginians as a whole were quite diverse, they tended to be diverse in the same way. A partial explanation may be that the Carthaginians began as a single but incredibly diverse group that maintained this diversity as it spread geographically. Second, across nearly 200 individuals, the team identified six pairs of people who were related despite being from settlements separated by the Mediterranean Sea. One group was even second or third cousins. As such, the team believes that migration between different regions of Carthaginian control was quite common and likely reflects the fact that their settlements remained closely connected through trade and exchange.

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Related reading in Bible History Daily

Who Were the Phoenicians?

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