The Punic people, or Carthaginians, were a Semitic people in the Western Mediterranean who migrated from Tyre, Phoenicia to North Africa during the Early Iron Age. In modern scholarship, the term Punic, the Latin equivalent of the Greek-derived term Phoenician, is exclusively used to refer to Phoenicians in the western Mediterranean, following the line of the Greek East and Latin West.

The largest Punic settlement was Ancient Carthage (essentially modern Tunis), but there were 300 other settlements along the North African coast from Leptis Magna in modern Libya to Mogador in southern Morocco, as well as western Sicily, southern Sardinia, the southern and western coasts of the Iberian Peninsula, Malta, and Ibiza. Their language, Punic, was a dialect of Phoenician, one of the Northwest Semitic languages originating in the Levant.

Literary sources report two moments of Tyrian settlements in the west, the first in the 12th century BCE (the cities Utica, Lixus, and Gadir) that hasn't been confirmed by archaeology, and a second at the end of the 9th century BCE, documented in written references in both east and west, which culminated in the foundation of colonies in northwest Africa (the cities Auza, Carthage, and Kition) and formed part of trading networks linked to Tyre, Arvad, Byblos, Berytus, Ekron, and Sidon in the Phoenician homeland. Although links with Phoenicia were retained throughout their history, they also developed close trading relations with other peoples of the western Mediterranean, such as Sicilians, Berbers, Greeks, and Iberians, and developed some cultural traits distinct from those of their Phoenician homeland. Some of these were shared by all western Phoenicians, while others were restricted to individual regions within the Punic sphere.

The western Phoenicians were arranged into a multitude of self-governing city-states. Carthage had grown to be the largest and most powerful of these city-states by the 5th century BCE and gained increasingly close control over Punic Sicily and Sardinia in the 4th century BCE, but communities in Iberia remained outside their control until the second half of the 3rd century BCE. In the course of the Punic wars (264–146 BCE), the Romans challenged Carthaginian hegemony in the western Mediterranean, culminating in the destruction of Carthage in 146 BCE, but the Punic language and Punic culture endured under Roman rule, surviving in some places until late antiquity.