Long before the clamor of Roman legions echoed across Europe and before the golden age of Athens left its philosophical mark on the world, there was another vibrant culture whose legacy radiated across the Mediterranean like sunlight dancing on waves. The Phoenicians, born in the Bronze Age city-states of the Levant—modern-day Lebanon and parts of Syria and northern Israel—were not mighty empire-builders in the traditional sense. They were seafarers, traders, artisans, and above all, connectors. These people charted the open sea not to conquer but to exchange—to share goods, stories, faith, and even letters. For it was from their ink-stained hands that the world’s first true alphabet would emerge, a gift of literacy that would transform the human story.
As the early centuries of the first millennium BCE unfolded, Phoenician mariners stitched a network of trading posts, ports, and colonies into the fabric of the Mediterranean world. These coastal dots stretched from the shores of the Levant across to Cyprus, through the Aegean, into North Africa, up the coasts of Sicily and Sardinia, and as far west as Iberia. At the heart of their voyages was a distinctive cultural thread—Phoenician language, art, and religion—that wove through a tapestry of diverse lands and peoples.
One of the greatest fruits of this maritime venture was Carthage, founded around 814 BCE in what is now Tunisia. A colony of Tyre, one of the dominant Phoenician city-states, Carthage grew to become a power of its own—eventually eclipsing its mother cities in wealth, influence, and military might. As Carthage expanded its influence, the communities it touched retained the Phoenician essence but took on new characteristics, becoming what the Romans would later call “Punic.” These Punic people, culturally Phoenician but distinct through their interwoven ancestry and colonial history, were the Carthaginians who would challenge Rome in a trilogy of wars remembered as the Punic Wars.
It is this era—rich in legend, conflict, and commerce—that has long captivated historians. Yet, despite thousands of years of scholarship, mystery still cloaked the true nature of these ancient peoples. Were the Punic populations, spread from Carthage to Spain, direct descendants of Levantine Phoenicians who had sailed west en masse? Or was something more complex at work—something more reflective of cultural entanglement than simple lineage?
A breakthrough arrived not from a dusty archive or a new archaeological dig, but from the double helix. Deep within ancient bones buried across Mediterranean shores, scientists found the answer embedded in strands of DNA.
The Max Planck-Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean, a collaboration co-directed by Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Michael McCormick of Harvard University, undertook one of the most ambitious genetic studies of the ancient Mediterranean to date. The results, published in the prestigious journal Nature, offered a startling revision of how we understand the spread of Phoenician culture and the human mosaic of the Punic world.
At the heart of the research was a simple question: who were the Punic peoples, really? To answer this, an international team of geneticists, archaeologists, and historians sequenced and analyzed genomes from human remains found in 14 archaeological sites identified with Phoenician and Punic communities. These sites spanned a vast swath of the ancient world—from the Levant to North Africa, from Iberia to the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Ibiza.
What emerged was not a story of mass migration, but of profound cultural diffusion. Lead author Harald Ringbauer, then a post-doctoral scientist at Harvard and now a group leader at the Max Planck Institute, summed it up succinctly: “We find surprisingly little direct genetic contribution from Levantine Phoenicians to western and central Mediterranean Punic populations.” In other words, the DNA told a tale of integration and local adoption rather than colonial displacement. The Phoenician presence across the Mediterranean was not the result of entire populations being transplanted from the Levant. Instead, it was the result of cultural exchange and localized assimilation.
The DNA profiles from Punic sites revealed startling heterogeneity. Carthage, often seen as the cultural flagship of western Phoenicia, was home to individuals with deeply diverse ancestries. North African lineages intertwined with those resembling contemporary Sicilian and Aegean populations. Each site, from the shores of North Africa to the stones of Ibiza, displayed its own unique genetic fingerprint, a testament to the fluid and cosmopolitan nature of the Punic world.
Harvard geneticist David Reich, co-leader of the study, emphasized this diversity. “At each site, people were highly variable in their ancestry,” he said, “with the largest genetic source being people similar to contemporary people of Sicily and the Aegean, and many people with significant North African-associated ancestry as well.” This stood in stark contrast to the older model of cultural transmission through colonization and demographic dominance.
These findings recalibrate our understanding of how Phoenician culture spread—not by overwhelming numbers or military force, but by the subtle power of ideas, language, and economic interdependence. Trade, intermarriage, religious syncretism, and shared urban lifestyles allowed local populations to take on Phoenician identities without losing their own. What emerged was a cultural superposition: the Phoenician cultural matrix layered onto indigenous substrates.
One of the most remarkable findings from the study was the discovery of a pair of second cousins—genetically close relatives—buried an ocean apart, one in North Africa and the other in Sicily. This singular pair stands as biological proof of the kind of long-distance mobility that characterized the ancient Mediterranean. It wasn’t just goods and beliefs that flowed along Phoenician trade routes. People, too, moved across the waves, forming family bonds and new communities far from their ancestral homes.
These revelations underscore the role of the Mediterranean not as a border but as a bridge. Far from separating civilizations, the sea connected them. In Punic cities, one might hear Levantine prayers, see Greek-style pottery, wear Iberian jewelry, and dine on African grains. This was a world in which cultural identity was not a singular fixed point but a kaleidoscope of influences—a polyphony rather than a monologue.
Ilan Gronau, a professor of computer science at Reichman University in Israel and one of the study’s co-authors, highlighted the power of genetic studies in uncovering these invisible histories. “Such studies,” he said, “highlight the power of ancient DNA in its ability to shed light on the ancestry and mobility of historical populations for which we have relatively sparse direct historical records.”
Indeed, while ancient texts mention Phoenician colonies and their expansion, the written record often comes through the lens of outsiders—Greeks and Romans with their own agendas and prejudices. The genetic data provide a corrective, offering a more democratic source of history. These molecules are unbiased witnesses. They tell us who people were, not just who others said they were.
The implications of this research ripple far beyond the study of the Punic world. It reframes how we think about cultural expansion in antiquity. It suggests that shared language and religious practices do not necessarily equate to shared ancestry. Cultural identities can spread without armies, and empires can rise not through domination, but through exchange and empathy.
This challenges a longstanding Western bias that equates civilization with conquest. The Phoenicians, and later their Punic successors, did not win their place in history with swords. They did it with sails. They mastered the currents, charted the stars, and trusted that the wind would carry them not only to new markets but to new ideas. Their legacy was not in walls built or cities conquered, but in alphabets carried, deities transplanted, and dialects absorbed.
And now, thanks to the marriage of archaeology and genomics, their story can be told with a richness and clarity that was once unimaginable. The bones beneath Carthage and Ibiza, long silent, now speak—not in inscriptions, but in sequences of A, T, C, and G. They tell us that the ancient world was more mobile, more mixed, and more modern than we ever dared imagine.
As we uncover this genetic palimpsest of the past, one truth becomes increasingly clear: the Mediterranean was never just a cradle of civilization. It was civilization in motion—an endless tide of people, languages, and lineages, ebbing and flowing, mixing and reemerging, always changing and yet deeply connected. And at the center of that tide, riding its crest with unmatched skill and subtlety, were the Phoenicians.
More information: David Reich, Punic people were genetically diverse with almost no Levantine ancestors, Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08913-3. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08913-3