Between roughly 900 and 500 BCE, Phoenician traders and colonists established settlements across the Mediterranean, from Cyprus to Malta to Sardinia to North Africa (Carthage, founded around 800 BCE) to Spain.

This Phoenician expansion is genetically visible in ancient DNA studies of first-millennium BCE Mediterranean populations.

Ancient individuals from Phoenician colonial sites show genetic profiles consistent with Levantine origin — profiles that connect them to the Canaanite populations of the Late Bronze Age and to the Israelite and Phoenician populations of the Iron Age Levant.

Against this background of Phoenician expansion, the genetic legacy of the Sea Peoples — particularly the Philistines — was being diluted and absorbed.

The southern Levantine coast, which had been distinctively Philistine in the early Iron Age with its Aegean genetic component, became progressively more integrated into the broader Semitic-speaking and genetically Levantine world as the centuries passed.