As I said, I've been reviewing notes I had made of the material in "Carthage Must Be Destroyed", in light of years of commentary that a "Levantine" signal in Southern Italians/Sicilians, came from Phoenicians/Carthaginians.
I'm not going to quote whole pages. Anyone is at liberty to pick up the book at amazon or from a library and check my conclusions. I assure you they are accurate.
A major point made by the author is that, as I've always maintained, the Phoenician colonies were entirely different from many of the Greek ones. The "Phoenicians" were "not" conquered by the Assyrians and driven out of their homes. Rather, they were "used" by the Assyrians and whoever else came to power in the region to conduct trade for them. It was because of the increasing pressure by the Assyrians to provide them with metals that the Phoenicians went west to establish colonies.
Their only "colony" on the Italian mainland was at Pithecusa near Neapolis, which, as was their wont, was located on a small island where they maintained markets and some manufacturies. Of the small population on that island, archaeologists estimate about 20% of that small population was actually Phoenician in origin. That's it for mainland Italy.
Now, there were, of course, in every port city in the Mediterranean, including in Etruria and Rome and Massalia and on and on, merchants of Phoenician, and Punic, and Greek, and Egyptian and every other nationality. Likewise, there were Venetian and Genovese and Lombard merchants and bankers all over Medieval central and Northern Europe. Is anyone going to seriously propose that they substantially changed the genetic signature of those countries?
As for the idiocy of suggesting that because Carthage signed a trade agreement with Etruscans and even Latins, that means there was a mass influx of Carthaginians into mainland Italy, I'm almost at a loss for words. Three big trading cultures, the "Punics", the Greeks, the Etruscans, and later the Latins were all present in the Mediterranean at the same time. When it was convenient they tried to cooperate, or to carve out territories belonging to one group or another in order to prevent conflict. Think of it in terms of China or Russia and the U.S. for goodness' sakes. You get to have your sphere of influence, your trading partners, and I'll have mine.
They tried it, it didn't work, and eventually wars broke out. Please do at least skim through this book and you'll understand this period of history in a much more nuanced way.
There were settlements in Sardinia and Spain as well, again established on ports or islands for the shipping of metals they found in the interior. The ports in southern Spain, in particular, can be compared to, let's say, The Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa, as a place to ship and trade goods, farm land so as to be able to replenish supplies on your ships etc.
Concentrating on Italy, since that is the topic of this thread, we can see that in Sardinia their imprint geographically and culturally is much stronger than in mainland Italy, yet there is no Levant Neolithic signal in Sardinians in the same amateur runs that find it in Sicilians and Southern Italians.
Let's turn to Sicily. The only Phoenician/Punic settlements in Sicily were in the far northwestern corner, in three small settlements. Their attempts to expand their influence were stymied, according to the author of this exhaustive text, by a "deluge" of Greek migrants (his words, not mine). He also says, by the way, that unlike the "Punics", "the Greek colonial modus operandi often involved the violent expulsion of indigenous communities."
So, I would think any reasonable person would agree that the long proposed and defended "theory" that the Phoenicians/Carthaginians living in northwest Sicily, clearly small in number, considering the number and size of their "colonies" somehow managed to infiltrate their genes not only all over Sicily but across the water into all of Southern Italy is highly unlikely, to put it more kindly than it deserves.
So, where does that leave us in terms of the Punics as possible candidates for this "extra" Levantine Neo ancestry. The preferred idea is always slavery. OK. Rome did certainly take "Carthaginian" soldiers and sailors as slaves. The problem is that it's highly doubtful even the majority of the Carthaginian troops were actually Carthaginians. They used Libyans, Spaniards, Cisalpine Gauls and on and on. There weren't enough Carthaginians to man these large armies.
In the conflict over Himera in Spain, the Carthaginian troops included "large numbers of mercenaries from across the central and western Mediterranean, including Libya, Spain, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica." These forces were further supplemented by those of Anaxilas, the Greek tyrant of Rhegium in southern Italy." Pg. 115. The defeat of this force was so total that "only a few bedraggled survivors made it back to Africa to bring news of the disaster." The forces for the next war on Sicilian soil were mostly Libyan levies and Iberian mercenaries. Pg. 122. According to the author, Carthage had "no permanent presence" in Sicily. In a subsequent war with mostly North African and Carthaginian troops, half of them died of plague. The rest managed to get a treaty with the Sicilian city states of western and central Sicily to pay tribute to Carthage. Under Dionysius of Siracusa, the Punics present in the city were expelled from the city. "Across Greek Sicily, towns and cities were now purged of their Punic inhabitants in an ugly orgy of ethnic cleansing that included atrocities and massacres." pg. 117. The last Punic outpost of Motya was totally destroyed and almost all their inhabitants, including women and children, were slaughtered.
In later periods, when he took on Rome, Hannibal, for example, employed not only lots of Iberian mercenaries, but Gallic ones, Cisalpine Gauls, my own Ligures/Apuani, Campanians, and even lots of Greeks. Indeed, some of his closest advisors were Greeks, and he had himself been schooled in the Greek classics and spoke Greek. There had also been Greek wives in the "royal" geneaology. Amazingly they apparently even had Scythian mercenaries.
As for the fate of the mercenary soldiers used by the Carthaginians, their fate, other than death, of course, varied. Many were enslaved, but the actual percentage or real "Punics" in their ranks is anybody's guess in my opinion. At the end of the First Punic War with Rome, one of the terms of the treaty was that Carthage had to evacuate all of its forces from Sicily. That was a master stroke. Once in North Africa they were an endless headache to the Carthaginians as they all demanded to be paid at once. These mercenaries almost led to the extinction of Carthage.
This was the situation with all the Carthaginian forces in all their great battles, so I would be very wary of assuming that the importation of some enslaved Carthaginian troops necessarily meant that they carried any actual "Punic" ancestry, or even North African ancestry.
That's over and beyond the fact that I don't know why they would all have been sent only to southern Italy and Sicily.
In addition, many fit men would have gone to the galleys and mines, young, attractive girls to brothels. Now, some would indeed become house slaves, some might be manumitted and start families. I just have no idea how you quantify the numbers involved or where they served and were manumitted.
I'll end with the destruction of Carthage itself. It was looted, sacked and burned to the ground. Those inhabitants who didn't die were indeed sent to the slave marts. By the end there were supposedly on 50,000 left alive:
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An estimated 50,000 surviving inhabitants were sold into slavery and the city was then leveled." I can find no information as to where precisely they were sent. As I said above, that most became house slaves who would procreate before or after manumission is highly unlikely. The Romans were not very kind to their enemies, and their mines, manufacturing centers, and galleys just ate up slaves. Some did, though, I'm sure.
I'm on my way out so I can't go into detail about another claim I just recently heard about, i.e. that this Levantine signal is because of the conquest of Syria. Syria was annexed in 64 BC. If it turns out that some of the "Southern Italian" like people of Rome who will be discussed in the Moots paper also have some of this purported signal, then that's a nonstarter. Even if it's only in the people of Pompei, that's 79 AD. In that short a period there were so many Syrian slaves, all deliberately sent only to southern Italy, to leave this kind of imprint?
I don't know the answers folks, but there are serious problems with these proposals.