You probably know the story of Carthage, the city in ancient Tunisia that gave its name to a sprawling empire that at its height ran along the Mediterranean coast from southern Spain to northern Egypt. Carthage's power and influence brought it into conflict over territory and resources with the Roman Republic, resulting in the three Punic Wars, fought between 264 and 146 B.C.E. At the beginning of the Third Punic War, the Roman statesman Cato the Elder spoke the famous phrase Carthago delenda est on the floor of the Senate, and the Roman military obliged. Carthage was obliterated, although the whole "plowed under with salt" is a nineteenth-century invention.
The Romans were hardly stupid enough to ruin arable land when they could just kill or enslave the inhabitants and take the place over for their own.
In an amusing "better late than never" postscript, the mayors of Rome and Tunis (Ugo Vetere and Chedli Klibi, respectively) signed a formal peace treaty ending the Punic Wars on February 5, 1985, 2,131 years after the final battle was fought.
The Carthaginian culture, language, and religion were all Phoenician in origin; the Phoenicians were a seagoing people who originated in what is now Lebanon and Syria. Even the name Carthage is an anglicization of the Phoenician qrt-ḥdšt, "new city." The most renowned Carthaginian, the general Hannibal -- the guy who famously invaded Italy and brought along some elephants -- was named Ḥanībaʿl in his language, meaning "by the grace of Ba'al." (Yes, Ba'al -- the Canaanite god mentioned in the Bible as a Very Bad Dude, and whose name is a cognate to the first half of the name of the demon Beelzebub.)
So the Carthaginians were culturally Phoenician. But what's curious is that a study published this week in the journal Nature describes research showing that the Carthaginian people weren't related to the Phoenicians at all -- they are much more closely related to Sicilians, Greeks, and the people of the Balearic Islands.
A team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, led by population geneticist Harald Ringbauer, analyzed the remains of two hundred people recovered from archaeological sites scattered around the Carthaginian world, and found that the only ones who were related to the Semitic Phoenicians and Canaanites were the ones who were actually in the Middle East. DNA from people in North Africa, Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, and Spain, while buried according to Carthaginian customs (and often with artifacts featuring the Punic script) was much more similar to the other, presumably non-Carthaginian inhabitants of ancient Greece, Italy, and Spain than it was to that of the Middle Easterners whose culture and language they shared.
The Phoenicians, apparently, were a culture of integration and assimilation, not replacement. But the degree to which the Carthaginian and Phoenician DNA differed was a surprise even to the researchers. “How can there be such a disconnect?” Ringbauer said. “Does this mean Phoenician culture was like a franchise that others could adopt? That’s one for the archaeologists.”
Of course, that tactic was familiar to their bitter enemies the Romans. Look at how Rome handled France. The Celtic Gauls who were in control of most of what is now France were conquered by the superior Roman military might, and after the fighting was over, those Gaulish groups who were content to let the Romans run things (and, of course, pay tribute) were largely allowed to continue to manage their own affairs. (The ones who objected, of course, were dealt with just as harshly as were the Carthaginians.) This is why the French people today are genetically largely Celtic and Germanic, but speak a language descended from Latin. (My own ancestry -- on my father's side from the French Alps, and on my mother's from a swath of western France from Bordeaux up into Brittany -- is, according to a DNA test, largely Gaulish in origin. Must be why I've always loved Asterix.)
All this is why you have to be careful not to conflate culture with ethnic origin. It's also why the concept of race is not nearly as cut-and-dried as most people think it is. Not only are just about all of us ethnic mixtures, our own cultures are amalgams. Not only can genetically unrelated groups share a culture, but most of the traits we think of as markers for race (such as skin and eye color, hair texture, and so on) are due to a handful of genes that happen to characterize particular groups, and overlook the fact that even very different-looking human groups share well over 99% of their DNA.
Like it or not, we're all cousins. Me, I love that. Anything that allows me to give an enthusiastic middle finger to the racists is okay by me.
Antiracism Rules!
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