The journal Nature has published the results of an international project that examined the genome of the Phoenicians. The study analysed the remains of 210 individuals from Phoenician necropolises across the Mediterranean, creating a sample set of remains from various regions of the Punic world. Unfortunately, the Phoenicians practiced cremation up until the 6^th century BC, making it impossible to conduct genetic analyses of remains dating back to the beginning of the Phoenician expansion in the Mediterranean at the turn of the 11^th to 10^th centuries BC.

The study’s main conclusion is that, despite a great deal of archaeological evidence of cultural, historical, linguistic, and religious connections, the Levantine Phoenicians made only a minor genetic contribution to Punic settlements in the central and western Mediterranean between the 6^th and 2^nd centuries BC. Contrary to the traditional view that the Punic world was largely genetically homogeneous, the vast majority of the buried individuals were not of Levantine ancestry, indicating the predominance of the indigenous population in key regions of Phoenician culture, including North Africa, Iberia, and Sicily. Thus, the main vehicle for the spread of Phoenician culture was not colonisation, but cultural assimilation.

The authors of the study highlight the importance of paleogenetic research for understanding Mediterranean history, as paleogenetics sheds light on the blank spots in history that lie beyond the reach of archaeology and source studies.

According to Oikoumene’s Editorial Board Member Boris Ye. Alexandrov, who is an Associate Professor in Moscow State University’s History Faculty, “the new article in Nature vividly demonstrates the broad prospects that the use of natural scientific methods, including paleogenetics, open for historical research. The models of Phoenician colonisation and the spread of Phoenician culture constructed by historians and archaeologists must now inevitably take into account the results of this international project on the reconstruction of the Phoenician genome. The conclusion about the heterogeneity of the Phoenician population in the later stages of Phoenician civilisation fully aligns with accounts from written sources, which indicate that the first colonists constituted a small minority among the local indigenous population of the central and western Mediterranean.”

According to Alexander A. Nemirovsky, an Oikoumene’s Editorial Board Member, “the genetic study conducted by the authors on individuals buried in the necropolises of various western Mediterranean Phoenician colonies and cities under Carthaginian rule in the 6^th century to the 2^nd century BC (several centuries after the Phoenician colonisation of these regions) revealed that their genetic profile was very different from that of the ancient Levant. This means that the individuals studied overwhelmingly descended not from the Phoenicians themselves, but from the local inhabitants of the colonised territories, non-Phoenician immigrants, and slaves of Phoenician colonists. In turn, this means that, by the second half of the first millennium BC, the genetic contribution of the original Phoenician colonists in these cities was almost completely overtaken and washed out by the contribution of the aforementioned categories of people — carriers of non-Levantine genes. Unfortunately, the title of the article characterises its findings imprecisely, as it does not indicate that the populations of these centres had no Phoenician ancestors but merely refers to the proportion of the genetic legacy of those ancestors among the studied individuals and the groups they represent several centuries after colonisation.”

Sources: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08913-3

Les stèles puniques de Carthage au musée du Louvre. Des offrandes à Tanit et à Baal Hammon // Sous la direction d’Hélène Le Meaux. Paris: Musée du Louvre Éditions, 2024.