An international team of scientists from Lebanon, Tunisia, France and New Zealand has sequenced the complete mitochondrial genome of the ‘Young Man of Byrsa, or ‘Ariche,’ a Phoenician who lived in Carthage in the 6th century BC.

“The Phoenicians are recognized as one of the great early civilizations of the Mediterranean,” said study co-leader Prof. Lisa Matisoo-Smith from the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, and her colleagues.

“First recorded as the descendants of the Canaanites, they inhabited the shores of the eastern Mediterranean and dominated the maritime trade routes of both the eastern and, later, the western Mediterranean during the second and first millennium BC.”

“The creators of the first alphabet, the Phoenicians documented their own records on papyrus and parchment which, unfortunately, disintegrate over time leaving behind limited historical information.”

“The main Phoenician coastal cities, Tyre, Sidon, Byblos and Arwad, located in what is now Lebanon and southern Syria, have been continuously occupied, so rarely subjected to major archaeological excavations. As a result, we actually know little about the Phoenicians other than what was written about them by the Greeks and Egyptians.”

The most well known Phoenician city was Carthage in Tunisia, founded by Queen Elissa and her followers who arrived from the Phoenician city of Tyre around 813 BC.

“Carthage grew from a small Phoenician trading port to one of the most powerful cities in the Mediterranean. Phoenician domination was to be eventually eroded and ultimately replaced by the Greek and later the Roman might in the Mediterranean,” the scientists explained.

“Carthage was destroyed by the Romans in the Third Punic War (149–146 BC).”

Byrsa Hill was the highest point in Carthage and was the site of a Phoenician acropolis. Today it is the location of the National Museum of Carthage.

“In 1994, gardeners planting a tree at the front of the Museum discovered a Punic burial crypt,” the researchers said.

“Inside this crypt were the remains of a young man along with a range of burial goods, all dating to the late 6th century BC.”

“An osteological analysis of the young man determined that he was approximately 1.7 m tall and aged between 19 and 24 years, and a craniometric analysis indicated likely Mediterranean/European ancestry as opposed to African or Asian.”

The team’s analysis, published in the journal PLoS ONE, shows that Ariche belonged to a rare European haplogroup that likely links his maternal ancestry to locations somewhere on the North Mediterranean coast, most probably on the Iberian Peninsula.

“The findings provide the earliest evidence of the European mitochondrial haplogroup U5b2c1 in North Africa and date its arrival to at least the late 6th century BC,” Prof. Matisoo-Smith said.

U5b2c1 is considered to be one of the most ancient haplogroups in Europe and is associated with hunter-gatherer populations there.

It is remarkably rare in modern populations today, with only a few modern sequences published or available in public databases. All of the reported U5b2c1 carriers are of presumably European ancestry, from Spain, Portugal, England, Ireland, Scotland, the United States and Germany.

“Interestingly, our analysis showed that Ariche’s mitochondrial genetic make-up most closely matches that of the sequence of a particular modern day individual from Portugal,” Prof. Matisoo-Smith said.

The team analyzed the mitochondrial DNA of 47 modern Lebanese people and found none were of the U5b2c1 lineage.

“Previous research has found that U5b2c1 was present in two ancient hunter-gatherers recovered from an archaeological site in north-western Spain,” Prof. Matisoo-Smith said.

“While a wave of farming peoples from the Near East replaced these hunter-gatherers, some of their lineages may have persisted longer in the far south of the Iberian Peninsula and on off-shore islands and were then transported to the melting pot of Carthage in North Africa via Phoenician and Punic trade networks.”

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Matisoo-Smith E.A. et al. 2016. A European Mitochondrial Haplotype Identified in Ancient Phoenician Remains from Carthage, North Africa. PLoS ONE 11 (5): e0155046; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0155046