The Carthaginians were not who thought

The Punic people almost had no genetic ties with the Phoenicians, although the latter founded the ancient great city of Carthage.

Long before Rome lifted from its seven hills, before Caesar crossed the rubic, existed Carthage – The other majestic, sea and mercantile large nation of the ancient Mediterranean.

Nestled along the sunny back of what Tunisia is today, the powerful empire of Carthage began as a humble Post.

The Phoenicians were the Sailors excellent ancient Mediterraneana Semitic people of the Levante, whose main cities – Tyrier, Sidon e Byblos They thrived with trade and navigation.

Around the ninth century BC, perhaps a few decades before the legendary foundation of Rome, A group of shot settlers sailed to West.

Pray the legend that Carthage was founded by Queen Elissa – best known to the Greeks and Romans as Dido.

Running away from political conflicts in Tire, Dido would have led his people through the sea to the North African coast, where the local Berber’s ruler told him that he could have as much land as he could be covered by the skin of a bull.

According to legend, Dido, intelligent and ingenious, cut the skin on straps thin and surrounded an entire hill: Byrsathe heart of Carthage.

From the top of that hill, The city flourished. It became a shopping center, linking the riches of Africa, the Iberian Peninsula and the Eastern Mediterranean. The Carthaginians inherited the Phoenician writing, worshiped the same gods (Baal, Tanit and Melqart) and kept their mother tongue for centuries.

It seems that the Carthaginians were a reflection of the ancient Phoenicians, which makes a new study, on Wednesday in Nature, even more surprising.

Phoenic Secrets

When scientists analyzed the genomes of 210 old individuals of the entire Mediterranean, in 14 places that extend From Israel to Spainthey were surprised to find that “the Phoenicians of the Levante gave little genetic contribution to the Punic Settlements in the Central and Western Mediterranean.”

Instead, people buried in public cities between the seventeenth and II BC had predominantly local DNA. His ancestry did not point to Tire or Sidon, but to Sicily, Aegean and North Africa. Even Carthage-perhaps the most iconic of the cities founded by the Phoenicians-was populated mainly by people with Sicilian-egene descent, and not Levantina.

Only three individuals of Punic Sites – Two in Sicily and one in the sardine – they had Some Levantine Ascendance substantial. And these, observe the investigators, may have arrived during the late Roman period.

“Our results mean that people of ancestry does not lead must have adopted the “Phoenician” cultureincluding language and religion, ”explains Harald Ringbauerresearcher at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology and first author of the study, to.

“The results also suggest that the Phoenician culture was integrated of foreigners. One hypothesis is that, over the centuries since the initial foundation of the Phoenician colonies, a assimilation process and dynamic integration He completely transferred the ancestral profile of the Punic people, ”he adds.

Sea culture, local genes

The Phoenicians were legendary sailors. They established trade between the Mediterranean, spreading their alphabet and iconography of Lebanon to Spain. But the new genetic study suggests that its influence to the west was more in terms of ideas than people.

Why this disconnection between culture and genes?

At least part of the answer lies in cremation practices of the first Phoenic settlers. Like the Romans, the Carthaginians used to believe their dead, destroying the DNA in the process.

But after the cremation decreased after 600 BC, new groups started to bury their dead in ways that preserved the DNA – And these groups were not of Levantina origin.

Effectively, After 400 BC, a different genetic pattern emerged: Increased North African ancestry-which the team modeled using an individual of the Iron Age in the interior of Algeria, began to appear in public places in Sardinia and Iberia.

Still, even in North Africa, he remained a minority. Most individuals continued to have its roots to Sicily and Aegean.

A genetic variation in punic sites It was actually surprisingly high. “In each sampled place, most men have different Haphogroups,” says the study: no lineage dominated.

Instead, common haploups in Europe, North Africa, and the next east were mixed in the punctic communities.

Researchers identified even long genetic segments shared among individuals separated by hundreds of kilometers – some by the Mediterranean himself.

Culture without colonizers

So what does this study on colonization in the ancient world?

“Our work serves as an important example of how cultural transmission can be largely Demographic Movement real. In the case of the Phoenician-Punic World, cultural expansion occurred without significant genetic flow of the original Levantine population, ”says Ringbauer.

O Contrast with Greek colonialism is revealing. “There is emerging evidence that contemporary Greek colonialism… it worked fundamentally differently, with people mainly from Greek descent to inhabit Greek colonial places,” explains the anthropologist.

O Punic model did not consist of transplanting populations. It was about transmit ideas – and let others develop them. At least that’s what old DNA tells us so far.

O Punic people was not a monoculturenor were they merely Phoenic in exile. They were shaped by trade, war, colonization and local interactions.

His shared identity emerged not from blood lineages, but from adoption of a set of common cultural toolsS – Language, Religion, Architecture – Imbudos from local flavors.

“We found that o Punic world was unexpectedly ‘interconnected‘. Punic places in a wide geographical distance shared the same profiles of various descent and, in many cases, we found even relatives between locations“, Explica Ringbauer.

“This highlights how mobile these people were And as, in the Phoenician-Punic maritime civilization, people moved regularly from great distances, ”concludes the anthropologist.