Byblos, Lebanon
37 km north of Beirut, Byblos is one of the top contenders
for the "oldest continuously inhabited city" award. According
to Phoenician tradition, it was founded by the god El. Although its beginnings
are lost in time, modern scholars say the site of Byblos goes back at
least 7000 years.
It was the Greeks, some time after 1200 BC, who gave
the name "Phoenicia", referring to coastal area. And they called
the city "Byblos" (Papyrus in Greek), because of the importance
of this commercial center in the papyrus trade.
Long before Greece and Rome, this ancient town was a powerful,
independent city-state with its own kings, culture and flourishing trade.
For several thousand years it was called Gubla and later Gebal, while
the term Canaan was applied to the coast in general.
The rise and fall of nearly two dozen successive levels
of human culture on this site makes it one of the richest archaeological
areas in Lebanon.
Under the domination of the Egyptian Pharaohs in the 3rd
and 2nd millennium BC, Byblos was a commercial and religious capital of
the Phoenician coast.
About this same time the scribes of Byblos developed an
alphabetic phonetic script, the precursor of our modern alphabet which
had traveled by the year 800 BC to Greece, changing forever the way man
communicated.
The earliest form of the Phoenician alphabet found to
date is the inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram of Byblos which
is now in the Lebanese National Museum.
Byblos was also the center of the Adonis cult, the god
of vegetation who dies in winter and is renewed each spring.
The main places of interest to visit in Byblos are the
Castle and church, built by the Crusaders in the 12th and 13th centuries,
the Egyptian temples; the earliest of which dates back to the 4th millennium
BC, the Phoenician Royal Necropolis, and the Roman Amphitheater. |
