Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Harald Ringbauer et al. writing in Nature report on a genetic study of the ancient Phoenicians that is really going to anger Lebanese Christian nationalists. In fact, it contains a profound lesson for nationalists and nationalism in general, which is that the whole thing is a scam thought up in the last 250 years.
The 19th century racist thinker Ernest Renan saw a racial distinction between “Aryans” and “Semites.” From that point of view, the Punic wars between Rome and Carthage had a racial element, since Phoenicians were classed as “Semites.” But it turns out it was all a tiff among people we would now class as Italians.
The Phoenicians had been thought to be a unified civilization that began in what is today Lebanon. Well, they did start off in what is today Lebanon. But the “unified civilization” bit turns out to be a misconception.
The Phoenicians developed an alphabet. Like most alphabets, the letters had originally been pictograms. The Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic, as well as the Greek and Roman alphabets (we still use the latter) derived from the Phoenician. For instance a picture of waves stood for water (ma’), and that became our M, which still looks like waves. Or a circle stood for eye (`ayn), which became our ‘o.’
Since the Phoenicians founded city-states all around the Mediterranean and left inscriptions in that alphabet, scholars had assumed that they were a related people. Phoenician settlements in the western Mediterranean were called “Punic,” but the language and customs were the same.
Regarding the Lebanese origins of this civlizational complex, Ringbauer et al. write, “We find that individuals from the Levantine Phoenician site of Akhziv in present-day Israel cluster together with previously published Bronze and Iron Age Levantine individuals, including from Megiddo in present-day Israel and the Phoenician cities of Sidon and Beirut in present-day Lebanon.” That is, they looked at ancient individuals from around the Levant and found that they all had shared haplotypes, i.e. they were Canaanites. Phoenicians, Hebrews, Nabataeans, etc. were all Canaanites culturally and genetically.
Now imagine the scientists’ astonishment when they looked at DNA from individuals who had lived in Phoenician cities such as Ibiza off Spain or Carthage in Tunisia to find that it did not display the ancient haplotypes or genetic sequences associated with Levantine peoples.
They write, “However, a mitochondrial genome from Carthage and whole-genome data from 12 individuals from the nearby rural Punic site of Kerkouane show substantial south European ancestry as well as indigenous North African ancestry. Partial North African ancestry was also found in genome-wide data from eight individuals from two Punic sites in Sardinia, combined with a broad eastern Mediterranean ancestry. Together with analysis of the whole-genome sequence of an individual from Ibiza, which was also interpreted to harbour eastern Mediterranean ancestry, this suggested that Punic people had complex ancestry.”
They observe of these “Phoenicians of the middle and western Mediterranean, “They are broadly distributed with a primary mode overlapping Bronze and Iron Age individuals from Sicily and the Aegean, regardless of sampled location.” There were only three exceptions: two persons from Sicily and one from Sardinia showed Canaanite genetic heritage.
In all the other 119 samples from “Punic” sites, the genetic heritage was mixed, showing patterns similar to those in ancient Greece and Sicily. After around 550 BC, when Carthage was founded by the “Phoenicians” in what is now Tunisia, some North African [Amazigh] genetic heritage starts to circulate among some of them. But this was a minority population. The authors observe, “Even in North Africa, 10 out of the 27 individuals from Kerkouane and 5 out of the 17 individuals from Carthage can be modelled with no indigenous North African ancestry, and 84% of individuals from these sites have more than 50% Sicilian–Aegean ancestry, making it the dominant ancestry component also in North African Punic sites.”
Also, the Iberians were mostly not Iberians. “Only two Iberian individuals, from Ibiza and Cádiz, had confidently high proportions of Bronze Age Iberian ancestry… Instead, Punic sites in the western Mediterranean share similar ancestry distributions of predominantly Sicilian–Aegean or North African origin.”
So how did all this happen? The authors hypothesize that Lebanese Phoenicians colonized Sicily, which had earlier had Greek colonies, and the Sicilians adopted Phoenician language, religion and culture. They they were the ones who struck out west, establishing Phoenician colonies in the central and western Mediterranean.
Ringbauer and his colleagues explain, “A critical question raised by our results is how and when Canaanite–Phoenician culture and language were adopted by people without any detectable Levantine ancestry. One hypothesis is that, after Levantine Phoenicians founded settlements in the central and western Mediterranean in the early first millennium bce, these communities continuously incorporated people with Sicilian–Aegean ancestry.”
Glass head pendant, Phoenician or Carthaginian, ca. 450–300 BCE. Metropolitan Museum. Public Domain.
Reporting on the study for a Nature briefing, Ewen Callaway quotes Ringbauer as asking how it was that many Mediterranean peoples abandoned their own local cultures for that of the Phoenicians. “Does this mean Phoenician culture was like a franchise that others could adopt? That’s one for the archaeologists.”
Of course they were a franchise. So were the ancient Greeks, whose culture was adopted by so many Egyptians in places like Alexandria. As late as the 200s and 300s, there are no Arabic or Aramaic inscriptions in and around Damascus, only Greek ones. Ashkenazi Jews in Europe were also a franchise, which was joined by many gentiles — especially but not only women.
Nineteenth century European theorists of nationalism confused language groups with kinship groups, assuming that people who spoke a language were a “race,” perhaps even a “pure” one.
Today many Lebanese Christians claim to be “Phoenicians,” as though it was a pure “race” unconnected to the “Arabs.” And they take pride in Carthage, a Phoenician city, and in the Phoenician outposts of Spain, imagining they were all “Lebanese.” Ringbauer has knocked that down.
There are no nations or races of that sort. There are no “Aryans” and “Semites.” This was a linguistic distinction that was stupidly racialized. Racial “nation” was all a fevered racist fantasy. Even modern genetics only traces two lines of ancestry, the Y chromosome and the mitochondrial DNA of the X chromosome, whereas we have millions of ancestors. We’re all mongrels, all mixed up, and people in the Mediterranean basin all have a common ancestor from not so long ago. All humans have one likely only 200,000 years ago.
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