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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The seafaring Phoenicians left the world more than a legacy of alphabets and purple dye — they left their DNA scattered throughout Mediterranean men, as well, according to a report published on Thursday.
As many as one in 17 men living in the Mediterranean region carries a Y-chromosome handed down from a male Phoenician ancestor, the team at National Geographic and IBM reported in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
“One boy in each school class from Cyprus to Tunis may be a direct male-line descendant of the Phoenician traders,” IBM’s Daniel Platt said in a statement.
“The results are important because they show that the Phoenician settlement sites are marked by a genetic signature distinct from any that might have been left by other trading and settlement expansions through history, or which may have emerged by chance.”
The researchers are part of the Genographic Project, launched in April 2005 to investigate human origins and migrations.
The five-year project aims to collect more than 100,000 DNA samples from indigenous and traditional peoples around the world and trace how humans migrated from Africa to nearly every corner of the globe.
In 2003, an international team of researchers reported in the same journal they had found genetic evidence that 8 percent of men in Central Asia, 0.5 percent of men globally, carried genes that could arguably be linked to the Mongol invader Genghis Khan.
The Phoenicians, who thrived from 1500 BC to 300 BC, were headquartered in the coastal areas of present-day Lebanon and Syria. Demand for Tyrian Purple, a dye made from shell of the Murex sea snail, drove much of their trade.
“When we started, we knew nothing about the genetics of the Phoenicians,” Chris Tyler-Smith of Britain’s Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, said in a statement.
“All we had to guide us was history: We knew where they had and hadn’t settled. But this simple information turned out to be enough, with the help of modern genetics, to trace a vanished people.”
The researchers used a simple tool — the Y chromosome. Females do not carry it and it is passed down, with the occasional mutation, intact from father to son, so it can be used as a kind of genetic clock to gauge how one man is related to another.
A similar tool is found in mitochondrial DNA, which women pass on, again with only the occasional change, to their children.
Reporting by Maggie Fox, editing by Will Dunham
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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Before the alphabet was invented, early writing systems had been based on pictographic symbols known as hieroglyphics, or on cuneiform wedges, produced by pressing a stylus into soft clay. Because these methods required a plethora of symbols to identify each and every word, writing was complex and limited to a small group of highly-trained scribes. Sometime during the second millennium B.C. (estimated between 1850 and 1700 B.C.), a group of Semitic-speaking people adapted a subset of Egyptian hieroglyphics to represent the sounds of their language. This Proto-Sinaitic script is often considered the first alphabetic writing system, where unique symbols stood for single consonants (vowels were omitted). Written from right to left and spread by Phoenician maritime merchants who occupied part of modern Lebanon, Syria and Israel, this consonantal alphabet—also known as an abjad—consisted of 22 symbols simple enough for ordinary traders to learn and draw, making its use much more accessible and widespread.
By the 8th century B.C., the Phoenician alphabet had spread to Greece, where it was refined and enhanced to record the Greek language. Some Phoenician characters were kept, and others were removed, but the paramount innovation was the use of letters to represent vowels. Many scholars believe it was this addition—which allowed text to be read and pronounced without ambiguity—that marked the creation of the first “true” alphabet.
The Greek language was originally written from right to left, but eventually changed to boustrophedon (literally, turning like oxen)—where the direction of writing alternated with every line. By the 5th century B.C., the direction had settled into the pattern we use today, from left tor right. Over time, the Greek alphabet gave rise to several other alphabets, including Latin, which spread across Europe, and Cyrillic, the precursor of the modern Russian alphabet.
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By John Noble Wilford
The Phoenicians, enigmatic people from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, stamped their mark on maritime history, and now research has revealed that they also left a lasting genetic imprint.
Scientists reported Thursday that as many as 1 in 17 men living today on the coasts of North Africa and southern Europe may have a Phoenician direct male-line ancestor.
These men were found to retain identifiable genetic signatures from the nearly 1,000 years the Phoenicians were a dominant seafaring commercial power in the Mediterranean basin, until their conquest by Rome in the 2nd century B.C.
The Phoenicians who founded Carthage, a great city that rivaled Rome. They introduced the alphabet to writing systems, exported cedars of Lebanon for shipbuilding and marketed the regal purple dye made from the murex shell. The name Phoenica, for their base in what is present-day Lebanon and southern Syria, means “land of purple.”
Then the Phoenicians, their fortunes in sharp decline after defeat in the Punic Wars, disappeared as a distinct culture. The monumental ruins of Carthage, at modern Tunis, are about the only visible reminders of their former greatness.
The scientists who conducted the new research said this was the first application of a new analytic method for detecting especially subtle genetic influences of historical population migrations. Such investigations, supplementing the traditional stones-and-bones work of archaeology, are contributing to a deeper understanding of human mobility over time.
The study was directed by the Genographic Project, a partnership of the National Geographic Society and IBM Corporation, with additional support from the Waitt Family Foundation. The international team described the findings in the current American Journal of Human Genetics.
“When we started, we knew nothing about the genetics of the Phoenicians,” Chris Tyler-Smith, a geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, England, said in an announcement. “All we had to guide us was history: we knew where they had and hadn’t settled.”
It proved to be enough, Dr. Tyler-Smith and Spencer Wells, a geneticist who directs the Genographic Project, said in telephone interviews.
Samples of the male Y-chromosome were collected from 1,330 men now living at six sites known to have been settled in antiquity as colonies and trading outposts of the Phoenicians. The sites were in Cyprus, Malta, Morocco, the West Bank, Syria and Tunisia.
Each participant, whose inner cheek was swabbed for the samples, had at least three generations of indigenous ancestry at the site. To this was added data already available from Lebanon and previously published chromosome findings from nearly 6,000 men at 56 sites throughout the Mediterranean region. The data were then compared with similar research from neighboring communities having no link to Phoenician settlers.
From the research emerged a distinctive Phoenician genetic signature, in contrast to genetic traces spread by other migrations, like those of late Stone-Age farmers, Greek colonists and the Jewish Diaspora. The scientists thus concluded that, for example, one boy in each school class from Cyprus to Tunis may be a descendant of Phoenician traders.
“We were lucky in one respect,” Pierre A. Zalloua, a geneticist at Lebanese American University in Beirut who was a principal author of the journal report, said in an interview. “So many Phoenician settlement sites were geographically close to non-Phoenician sites, making it easier to distinguish differences in genetic patterns.”
In the journal article, the researchers wrote that the work “underscores the effectiveness of Y-chromosomal variability” in tracing human migrations. “Our methodology,” they concluded, “can be applied to any historically documented expansion in which contact and noncontact sites can be identified.”
Dr. Zalloua said that with further research it might be possible to refine genetic patterns to reveal phases of the Phoenician expansion over time — “first to Cyprus, then Malta and Africa, all the way to Spain.” Perhaps, he added, the genes may hold clues to which Phoenician cities — Byblos, Tyre or Sidon — settled certain colonies.
Dr. Wells, a specialist in applying genetics to migration studies who is also an explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society, suggested that similar projects in the future could investigate the genetic imprint from the Celtic expansion across the European continent, the Inca through South America, Alexander’s march through central and south Asia and multicultural traffic on the Silk Road.
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An artist’s reconstruction of the wine press at Tell el-Burak, looking from the southeast.
The oldest press found in the country was used by ancient Phoenicians to manufacture vintages once adored around the Mediterranean.
Archaeologists have unearthed new evidence of the extensive overseas trade in wine by the ancient Phoenicians, with the discovery of the oldest wine press in Lebanon.
The find sheds new light on winemaking by the Phoenicians, the seafaring merchants who introduced a culture of drinking wine throughout the ancient Mediterranean, and whose influence lives on in the beverage’s worldwide popularity.
Excavations at Tell el-Burak, about five miles south of the Lebanese coastal city of Sidon, have revealed the well-preserved remains of a wine press used from at least the seventh century B.C. It is the earliest wine press ever found in the Phoenician homelands, which roughly corresponded to modern Lebanon. The discovery is featured in a study published Monday in the journal Antiquity.
Large numbers of seeds show grapes were brought there from nearby vineyards and crushed by treading feet in a large basin of durable plaster that could hold about 1,200 gallons of raw juice.
The resulting “must” was collected in a large vat and stored in distinctive pottery jars known as amphorae for fermenting, aging, and transport. (Here’s how climate change is changing the flavor of French wine.)
The wine press at Tell el-Burak. While Phoenicians spread wine culture across the ancient Mediterranean world, evidence for their local manufacturing efforts was scarce until now.
The wine press was excavated along with four mudbrick houses at Tell el-Burak, part of a Phoenician settlement inhabited between the eighth and sixth centuries B.C. that was probably devoted to making wine for trading overseas, the researchers write.
“Wine was an important Phoenician trading item,” says Hélène Sader, an archaeologist at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and co-director of the Tell el-Burak Archaeological Project. Phoenician wine from the Sidon region was particularly famous and mentioned in texts from ancient Egypt, she adds.
But little evidence of Phoenician winemaking had been found in Lebanon itself, possibly due to the haphazard nature of archaeological excavations.
“The coast of Lebanon was never thoroughly surveyed, and very few sites with Iron Age [Phoenician] remains have been properly excavated,” Sader says.
Some similar winemaking sites, however, have been found on the northern coast of what is now Israel, which belonged at that time to the Phoenician kingdoms of Tyre and Sidon.
The Phoenicians didn’t invent wine—evidence of it from about 8,000 years ago has been found in the country of Georgia—but they spread winemaking throughout the ancient Mediterranean, along with olive oil and innovations such as the alphabet and glass.
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The ancient seafarers introduced vineyards and wineries to their colony cities in North Africa, Sicily, France, and Spain. And they made it popular through trade with ancient Greece and Italy, where wine from wild grapes was known at the time but not so highly developed, says University of Toronto archaeologist Stephen Batiuk, who was not involved in the research. (Discover how alcohol has fueled the development of arts, language, and religion.)
“The Phoenicians perhaps introduced a drinking culture, [new styles of] drinking vessels, and a different way of relating to wine,” he says.
The Phoenicians’ love of wine extended to their religion, and its ceremonial use was reflected in other Near East religions as well.
University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Patrick McGovern, an expert in ancient winemaking who was not involved in the latest study, explained that the Phoenicians were descended from the Canaanites, a Bronze Age people who were also predecessors of the Israelites.
“Wine was the Phoenicians’ principal beverage for sacrifice,” he says. “But that was occurring already with the Canaanites, and it was passed along into Judaism and Christianity.”
McGovern speculates that Tell el-Burak may even have supplied some of the hundreds of amphorae on two Phoenician shipwrecks off Ashkelon in Israel, which date from around the same time.
“We did an analysis on several of the amphorae, and it was wine,” he said. “Maybe these vessels were coming from there.”
The Tell el-Burak project is a joint effort by an AUB team and archaeologists in Germany who have studied the site since 2001, although there’s been no work at Tell el-Burak for the past two years due to Lebanon’s economic difficulties, says Sader.
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There are three primary human status games in all human cultures: dominance, merit and virtue.

A dominance status game is based primarily on physical size and ability to intimidate others and appear to be able to protect oneself and one’s own space, but also to compel others to do what they do not desire necessarily to do by either intimidation, threat of physical violence, or the actual exercise of physical violence.

This status game is intended to curb violence because the behaviors are primarily about signalling intimidation to avoid conflict and not actually engaging in conflict. It can also be misleading. It isn’t based on any actual prowess in fighting or self defense, but in looking intimidating. Which is why this game of status is probably the most asinine and the one that most humans are ready to disengage from.

The second is the merit status game which is the most valuable of all the status hierarchies since it seeks to grant status and high prominence to those individuals who have earned the respect of others and have usually benefited society and many other people through their work and their striving to be disciplined and accomplished.

This hierarchy is only problematic when it does not permit merit to be the only deciding factor and when it seeks to compel by fiat a forced high standing to an individual with only the appearance of merit. Rich people sending kids to expensive Ivy League schools is one such example. It is a form of corruption since it corrupts both the dominance hierarchy and the merit hierarchy.

The third is the virtue status game. This game is the most commonly practiced among women, competitiveness in the dominance hierarchy is pretty well impossible for them due to biological factors and so most women don’t even bother playing in the dominance hierarchy directly, but rather use virtue to play in the dominance hierarchy by assuming the position of a righteous victim. Thus, when feminists attack men for their nature or for competing in the dominance hierarchy, they’re not engaged in the pursuit of Justice, rather their engaged in a passive aggressive female aggression form of competition in the male dominance hierarchy by deprecating

We can see right away dialectically, using a hegelian approach, why the virtue category has become so saturated that even virtue can be made to be pathologized and monetize and commodified. In a world of 8 billion people, there are many many high status and practitioners of all of the status game hierarchies. And vast majority of women exclude themselves from the other two simply by who they are. They don’t play in the dominance hierarchy and most of them or many of them choose career paths and life paths that exclude them from ever being somebody extraordinary by their accomplishments. So almost all women play exclusively in the virtue status hierarchy and there is no more powerful position in that hierarchy than that of a righteous victim. Thus you understand why there are competition who can be the bigger victims it actually dialectically grants the highest status position in the only status hierarchy than most women play all the time