Ancient DNA from across the Mediterranean now suggests that Phoenician culture spread largely through coastal neighbours adopting language, writing and trade habits, rather than through waves of settlers replacing earlier populations.
Lead author Harald Ringbauer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig found “surprisingly little direct genetic contribution from Levantine Phoenicians” to western Mediterranean Punic communities.
The finding complicates tidy tales of conquest and colonisation. It is less a story of tribes on the move and more one of harbours connected by routes of exchange.
What the DNA Changes
For decades, schoolbooks described the Phoenicians as seafaring merchants from the Levant who planted colonies across the Mediterranean. Carthage in modern Tunisia, Gadir in today’s Cádiz and other ports were often framed as outposts of a roaming ethnic group.
The new study, co-authored by 70 researchers including Peter van Dommelen from Brown University, paints a subtler picture. Ancient genomes from 196 individuals at sites in Spain, Italy, Tunisia and Lebanon show that local populations remained dominant, with Levantine ancestry present but minimal.
Between the sixth and second centuries BCE, despite abundant archaeological evidence of cultural, historical, linguistic and religious links, genetic data reveals almost no Levantine contribution. In practice, that means an Iberian child could grow up speaking a Punic tongue, praying to Phoenician gods and using a Phoenician alphabet, whilst still carrying mostly Iberian genetic roots. Culture travelled faster than bloodlines.
Ports as Shared Spaces
The Phoenicians were expert sailors, but they were also practical. Their wealth came from timber, purple dye made from seashells, glass and metalwork moved between many coasts. Every successful voyage depended on long-term agreements with local elites, craftsmen and dock workers.
Archaeology shows that so-called Phoenician goods sit alongside indigenous styles in many ports. In Sardinia and southern Iberia, pottery kilns and metal workshops blend techniques that cannot be assigned neatly to one group or another. The research team even identified related individuals at distant sites, including a pair of possible second cousins: one from North Africa, one from Sicily.
These towns looked less like foreign enclaves and more like shared meeting points. Temples, markets and shipyards served people who might call themselves different things yet used the same harbours and, eventually, the same alphabet. Van Dommelen notes that settlements “seemed to be more connected with each other, via maritime routes, than with their local neighbours in the hinterlands.”
Rethinking Origins and Ownership
This matters because modern debates about identity still prefer clean lines. National stories often claim ancient peoples as exclusive ancestors, whilst some political movements cast present-day neighbours as eternal outsiders.
The genetic and archaeological record keeps undermining those categories. If Phoenician influence spread mostly through intermarriage, local adoption and commercial partnerships, then coastal communities from Lebanon to southern Spain have a long history of mixed practices rather than sealed ethnic blocks.
For Mediterranean societies today, that history can cut two ways. It can feed insecurity about “losing purity”, or it can support a different view: ports and sea lanes have always been places where cultures overlap, and that overlap is normal.
A Sea of Shared Inventions
The alphabet that underpins most European and Middle Eastern scripts began as a practical tool in this world of ships and ledgers. Glass production, purple dye and certain religious symbols also travelled by hull and contract, not by invasion alone. Before the sixth century BCE, Phoenicians cremated their dead, leaving no DNA trace. Funeral rituals shifted to burial around that time.
Recognising trade-based diffusion does not erase violence or exploitation in ancient commerce. Phoenician elites held power; some ports depended on slavery. But it loosens the grip of simple tales in which one people “brought civilisation” to passive coasts or seized them by force.
After the Discovery
New genetic work will not end political arguments over the past. It does, however, give present-day citizens different images to work with. The Mediterranean was already a shared workshop long before modern borders, with cultures that grew through contact more than through conquest.
Pierre Zalloua, a geneticist at Khalifa University, puts it simply: “The Phoenicians were a culture of integration and assimilation. They settled where they sailed.”
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