The Punic People Were Mostly Greek, Not Levantine, In Ancestry

Ancient DNA from the Iron Age and classical Greco-Roman era reveals that the Punic people were much closer genetically to the Greeks and modern Sicilians than to the Phoenicians of the Levant who founded this maritime empire in the Western Mediterranean.

Punic people from this time period had been expected to be genetically similar to the Phoenicians were had often been assumed to be the ancestors of the Punic people, since archaeological and historical information indicated that the Phoenicians founded Carthage and other Punic cities. Linguistic information had also supported this expectation:

The Punic language, also called Phoenicio-Punic or Carthaginian, is an extinct variety of the Phoenician language, a Canaanite language of the Northwest Semitic branch of the Semitic languages. An offshoot of the Phoenician language of coastal West Asia (modern Lebanon and north western Syria), it was principally spoken on the Mediterranean coast of Northwest Africa, the Iberian Peninsula and several Mediterranean islands, such as Malta, Sicily, and Sardinia by the Punic people, or western Phoenicians, throughout classical antiquity, from the 8th century BC to the 6th century AD.

To the extent that the Punic people were genetically different from the Greeks, this was predominantly due to Iberian and Northwest African admixture, rather than due to Levantine admixture. 

Levantine admixture was completely absent from the Punic sample, except in three individuals (about 5% of the Punic sample analysed with Admixture) who were predominantly Levantine, and another four individuals who were predominantly North African in ancestry with very minor Levantine admixture (but with no Greek, Iberian, or other kinds of ancestry). 

This suggests a narrative in which a 95% Greek-like Punic people may have mostly replaced (without meaningful admixing with) a society in which some people with nearly purely Levantine Phoenicians, and some people were assimilated indigenous Northwest Africans with minor Phoenician ancestry.

Likewise, none of the contemporaneous ancient DNA from the Levant showed any Greek admixture at all, although three of eleven samples had small amounts of North African ancestry, and a fourth had small amounts of Iranian and Iberian ancestry (but no North African admixture).

The paper is Harald Ringbauer, et al., "Punic people were genetically diverse with almost no Levantine ancestors" Nature (April 2025).

As Bernard explains at his blog (via Google translate from French):

Phoenician culture emerged in Bronze Age city-states in the Levant. By the early first millennium BCE, the Phoenicians had established an extensive trade network along the Mediterranean coast as far south as the southwest shores of the Iberian Peninsula, spreading their culture, religion, and language. 

By the mid-sixth century BCE, Carthage, a Phoenician colony in present-day Tunisia, emerged as a major center of power in the central and western Mediterranean, as Levantine influence declined as their cities fell under the control of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires. Carthage subsequently came into conflict with Greek city-states in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, and then with the Roman Empire in the third and second centuries BCE, before its final destruction in 146 BCE. 

In this article, the term Punic is given to all archaeological sites in the central and western Mediterranean associated with Phoenician culture, dated between the sixth and second centuries BCE, corresponding to the hegemony of Carthage in the region.

They analyzed the genomes of 210 ancient individuals from 14 Phoenician or Punic archaeological sites located in the Iberian Peninsula, Sardinia, Sicily, North Africa and the Levant dated between 600 and 150 BCE. There are no individuals older than 600 BCE, because before this date cremation was the most common burial method in these communities.

We don't know if the Phoenician founders of Carthage were later replaced by Greeks, if the original Bronze Age Phoenician colonists were recruited from Greece in the first place with a small endogamous caste of Levantine elites leading them, or if they were brought in by the Phoenicians later on as a caste of maritime people subordinate to the Phoenicians who ultimately rose to become the dominant caste in Punic society as the Bronze Age Phoenician maritime empire fell apart.

The ancient DNA samples come almost entirely from the time period at and after the Punic region lost close contact with the Phoenicians of the Levant.

It is possible that Levantine Phoenicians and Greek/North African/Iberian peoples co-existed in the Punic region but were basically genetically distinct endogamous castes, and that the Phoenician ancient DNA from this later period is mostly absent from the sample because Phoenicians continued to cremate their dead, rather than because they had been replaced, while the other caste that had substantially Greek ancestry buried their dead at this point. (The Bronze Age Greeks also mostly cremated their dead at the point in time when Indo-Europeans conquered them and converted them to an Indo-European language.)

This linguistic data can help us weigh which of the possible narratives to explain the ancient DNA is most plausible.

The fact that the Punic people spoke a Phoenician language, rather than Greek or Latin, however, despite their lack of significant Levantine Phoenician genetic ancestry, suggests that the ancestors of the Punic people with Greek ancestry underwent a language shift from Greek to Phoenician due to elite dominance by a Levantine Phoenician elite.  

If ancestors of the genetically Greek Punic people had replaced the Levantine Phoenician people by simply conquering them, we would have expected the Punic people to speak a language related to Greek rather than a North Semitic language (that is a close linguistic cousin of Hebrew and Arabic).

Yet, the lack of admixture between the caste whose members had any Levantine Phoenician ancestry, and the caste that is mostly Greek in genetic ancestry tends to disfavor the presence of the non-Levantine caste in the earliest Bronze Age founding period of Carthage. This inference is particularly strong in light of that fact that the Phoenicians did have some admixture with the indigenous North Africans who proceeded them in Carthage and the vicinity.

It is more plausible that the primarily Greek caste became part of Punic society in the roughly two and a half entry long time period from the mid-sixth century BCE, when Levantine influence declined as their cities fell under the control of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires, to the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, when Carthage subsequently came into conflict with Greek city-states. 

Before that, these Phoenician colonies were probably just Levantine Phoenicians and indigenous North Africans. It also seems likely that this demographic shift took place at the early end of this quarter millennium time period, allowing the dominant-subordinate status of the respective castes to emerge before the conflicts with the Greek city-states reached their high water mark.

Another possibility is that part of what keep a Levantine Phoenician caste distinct and endogamous from a caste with an ancestral Greek core, is that the Levantine Phoenician caste spoke Punic, while the caste with an ancestral Greek core spoke some dialect of Greek as their primary language, but didn't interact with the outside world much because the Levantine Phoenicians were the ruling caste of the Punic world, even though they made up only a modest percentage of the total population. 

This would have some similarities to the situation in medieval Finland while it was under Swedish rule, where power was held by Swedish speakers for centuries, even though most of the people spoke Finnish as their primary language, but with less genetic admixture between the two linguistic groups.