The Punic empire in Denmark

Robert Mailhammer theorises that the Canaanite languages affected the prehistoric Germania. I won't rule it out.

Our first constraint is 200 AD. That is when the Germans fanned south and north from their Bothnia homeland.

Cyrus Gordon (notoriously) thought that Semitic lies behind Linear A. On closer look, this is likely... for its accountants. This is what Mailhammer finds in the (copious) vocabulary which proto-Germanic doesn't have from IndoEuropean. The Shilling, for instance: *skil-ling < *sQIL < *seqayl cf. "shekel". That would require paraHebrew in its Carthaginian form.

To clarify, only two routes are possible between Denmark and the Iron Age Med. One is a land route from a port in the Gaulish Riviera, heading north up the Rhône (historically, by coches d'eau), then the Saône and (here) the Doubs to the Rhine. The other route is the Atlantic. The former requires a Punic colony around what's now Arles and friendly ports up river. The latter requires the Strait of Gibraltar, and ports along the coast. I think the Greeks owned Massilia and blocked that route too early. Also: if involving Carthage directly, the German trade must postdate Carthage's supremacy over the Strait which is Hamilcar Barqa, I believe. And I don't think his empire lasted long enough. More likely is general North African contact.

Either way the thesis would be much easier to defend if there could be found Punic bastions along the Atlantic littoral: Galicia, Brittany, Bilbao between them (because Iron Age navigation couldn't do the route direct), Cornwall of course, Calais / Dover.

AFTERTHOUGHT 8/4: We sure it's Punics and not just plain JEWS? Seriously, we see "shekel" being memed all over 4chan to this day. Those guys accent the former syllable but maybe the traders of the Roman Empire went with the latter. Especially if they were Judaeo-Berber... as would kick off from Casablanca.