Who Founded Carthage? New Genetic Study Upturns Old View

Phoenicians no doubt traveled to and from Carthage, he said, and over the six or seven centuries of its Punic life many probably relocated there and had families, but they could not have amounted to more than a tiny fraction of the population. “Certainly there’s no evidence of a regular supply of Phoenician women to become male colonists’ wives,” Dr. Hoyos said.

From the start, he proposed, both male and female settlers found partners in the surrounding regions. “We know of a few marriages between Carthaginian nobles — two of whom were Hannibal’s sisters — with princes of the Numidian peoples to the west of Carthaginian-controlled territory,” he said.

Besides aligning with existing theories, the new findings point to a demographic shift around the sixth century B.C., when Carthaginians adopted a new dialect (Punic) and the dominant form of burial changed from cremation to interment.

“The genetic data make it clear that these cultural changes accompanied a profound change in the population,” Dr. Reich said. A goal for future research, he added, should be to better understand the nature of that change, integrating the genetic, archaeological and historical evidence.

The relatively small sample size of the new study makes generalization difficult, said Eve MacDonald, a historian at Cardiff University and author of the forthcoming “Carthage: A New History of an Ancient Empire,” who was not involved with the project. “But the paper shows us how we need to broaden our understanding of the ancient worlds beyond simplistic narratives of us and them, or Roman and Carthaginian,” she said.

For Dr. MacDonald, the results prove that being Carthaginian was not a specific genetic marker and underscore the complexity of the city-state and its people. “Today, we are so much more than just our genes, and identity cannot be reduced to a singularity,” she said. “What made someone Carthaginian would have been many things, including a link to Carthage itself, its myths, stories, cultures and families.”