Post by dividavi on Jul 29, 2017 3:24:25 GMT
...if you believe in that sort of thing as my avatar put it.
TEXT:
The team published its results in The American Journal of Human Genetics.
“The conclusion is clear,” said Iosif Lazaridis, a geneticist at Harvard who was not involved in the study. “Based on this study it turns out that people who lived in Lebanon almost 4,000 years ago were quite similar to people who lived there today, to the modern Lebanese.”
Marc Haber, a postdoctoral fellow at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in England and lead author on the study, said that compared with other Bronze Age civilizations, not much is known about the Canaanites.
Here's the Wikipedia entry for Punic Languages - those descended from Carthaginian which in turn derives from Phoenician (Punic)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punic_language
According to the article Saint Augustine of Hippo was the last writer who had some proficiency in Carthaginian. According to him, Punic was still spoken in his region (Northern Africa) in the 5th century, centuries after the fall of Carthage, and there were still people who called themselves "chanani" (Canaanite: Carthaginian) at that time. The people certainly had some memories of their Canaanite heritage during Augustine's time.
It may be that Punic was spoken as late as the 11th Century CE. Besides Augustine, the only proof of Punic-speaking communities at such a late period is a series of trilingual funerary texts found in the Christian catacombs of Sirte, Libya: the gravestones are carved in Ancient Greek, Latin and Punic. It may have even survived the Muslim conquest of the Maghreb, as the geographer al-Bakri describes a people speaking a language that was not Berber, Latin or Coptic in Sirte, where spoken Punic survived well past written use.[8] However, it is likely that Arabization of the Punics was facilitated by their language belonging to the same group (both were Semitic languages) as that of the conquerors and so they had many grammatical and lexical similarities.