The Carthaginian Empire around 330 BC
The Carthaginian elite spoke a language that derived from Phoenicia, used a variant of the Phoenician alphabet and considered themselves a Phoenician colony. Their religious iconography was Phoenician and their gods seem to have been variants of Phoenician deities. But there have always been signs that the Phoenician influence in Carthage was not all that deep. They sailed Greek-style ships, their architecture was not particularly Phoenician, and by later Roman times (a period we know a lot about) there is little evidence of Phoenician influence in north African culture. If you read Roman accounts of the Punic Wars, the Carthaginian leadership comes across as no different from Greeks, and Hannibal was very popular among the Greek leaders of Sicily and southern Italy. So how Phoenician was Carthage?
Enter a big team of international scientists led by Robert Reich of Harvard who analyzed DNA from Carthagian sites around the western Mediterranean dating to between 600 and 150 BC. (NY Times, Science, Scientific American)
An international research team analyzed the degraded DNA from the remains of 210 individuals, including 196 from 14 sites traditionally identified as Phoenician and Punic in the Levant, North Africa, Iberia, Sicily, Sardinia and Ibiza. The study concluded that the Phoenicians did not intermingle equally with all of the people they met. “They had little DNA from Sardinians, Iberians or even North Africans,” Dr. Reich said. Only three of the 103 people whose bones were carbon-dated had substantial Levantine heritage, and those three — one from Sardinia, two from Sicily — may have been immigrants who arrived during the Roman period that followed the Third Punic War.Overwhelmingly, the main ancestry of the Phoenicians studied was Greek; these were most likely people whom the Phoenicians encountered and mixed with in Sicily, where Greek and Phoenician colonies existed side by side. Dalit Regev, an archaeologist at the Israel Antiquities Authority who collaborated on the paper, said the research showed that the restless mobility of seafaring Aegean men and women and their descendants powered the expansion not only of the Greeks but of the Phoenicians, too. For more than 2,000 years, the general assumption was that the Carthaginians derived from the Levant, specifically Canaan, the source of their language and religion. But an eight-year study published on Wednesday in Nature suggests that, from the sixth to the second centuries B.C., Levantine Phoenicians made only a negligible genetic contribution to Punic colonies.
Reich summarized the findings like this:
They preserved Phoenician culture, language, religion and their commercial lifestyle, but passed it to people of biologically different ancestry with whom they mixed after they arrived in these regions.
Punic Carthage by J.C. Golvin
Lots of caveats here: as always, burials skew toward the elite, and the Carthaginian Empire was a big, unwieldy, polyglot construction with a lot of local variation, so 200 is not a very big sample. But I am certainly not surprised by these findings. As I indicated, I am not ever sure how much culture the Phoenician passed on, especially outside the elite; so far as I can tell, the main language in Carthaginian North Africa was Berber and this remained true down to the Arab conquest and beyond. Historians consulted by the NY Times point out that our records from the classical period do not describe people arriving at Carthage from Phoenicia, but do show members of the Carthaginian elite (like Hannibal's sisters) marrying into Greek or Berber families. Although the authors of this study play up their "surprising" findings, I would have been more surprised if these studies had shown a big genetic impact from Phoenicia.
More interesting is the genetic dominance of Greeks, another piece of evidence that the expansion of Greek colonists across the Mediterranean was a key historical event, setting the stage for the dominance of classical civilization under the Roman Empire.
Back in the 1980s I knew a guy from an elite Tunisian family who grew up speaking mainly French. He had a bit for describing his family that I heard him use more than once, saying that he was Berber-Phoenician-Greek-Roman-Arab-Turkish-French. It struck me then that this is a much better way to think about human ancestry that imagining lines of descent from ancient founders. We are mixers, and always have been.