Byblos

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A landslide did it. In the winter of 1922 the rain came down on the slope below the old town, the soil gave way, and the side of a hill north of Beirut slid into the sea, opening a row of tombs cut ten meters deep into the rock. The French excavator Pierre Montet, working the site the next year, climbed down into one of them — Tomb V — and found a limestone sarcophagus carved with a king enthroned and a procession of mourners, and running along its lid and rim a band of letters. The letters were the find. They were one of the longest early texts in the alphabet the Phoenicians gave the world, and they were lying in the necropolis of a city that was already ancient when those letters were cut. The city was Byblos, and it had been there, by the most generous reckoning, for the better part of seven thousand years.

The oldest city

Byblos sits on a low sandstone headland on the Lebanese coast, about forty kilometers north of Beirut, where two small harbors notch the shore and the Lebanon range rises close behind. Its modern name is Jbeil, the Arabic descendant of a chain of older names that runs back without a break to the Bronze Age. To its own people it was Gebal — the word means roughly “mountain” or “frontier,” the town at the foot of the range. In the cuneiform of Mesopotamia and the diplomatic correspondence of Egypt it was Gubla. The Egyptians, who knew it earliest of all, wrote it Kbn or Kpn. Only the Greeks called it Byblos, and that name, as it happened, would outlast all the others.

The claim made for Byblos — that it is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world — is the kind of claim several cities make, and it cannot be settled cleanly, since “city” and “continuous” are both elastic. But the tell at Byblos, the mound of stacked occupation that excavation has cut through, carries the argument as well as any rival. The first traces of settlement on the site fall between roughly 8800 and 7000 BCE, in the Neolithic, when a fishing community of round-floored huts clustered on the headland. By the fifth millennium the village had grown to monumental stone houses with crushed-limestone floors and a cemetery of burials in large jars. There is no clean break after that — no layer of ash and abandonment dividing the prehistoric village from the historic city. The place simply kept being lived in, age after age, until the present, so that the ground beneath the modern town is a single deep column of human time, Neolithic at the bottom, Ottoman near the top, with the Phoenician, Persian, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, and Crusader city laid down in between.

What turned the village into a city was a tree. The slopes behind Byblos grew the cedar of Lebanon, the great straight-grained timber that the river-valley civilizations to the south lacked entirely. Egypt had grain and gold and linen and almost no usable wood; Byblos had the forest and a harbor. By the third millennium BCE the city was the chief funnel through which Lebanese cedar reached the Nile — shipped south in such quantity that the Egyptian word for a seagoing vessel, kbnt, “Byblos-boat,” was simply the name of the ships that ran the timber route. The traffic ran the other way as well, and that return cargo is half the reason the city matters: among the goods that came north from Egypt to Byblos was papyrus, the reed pith beaten into writing sheets, which Byblos in turn passed on to the Aegean.

The ruins of Byblos on the coastal headland, with the Crusader-era and earlier remains stacked above the Phoenician strata. Photo: Vyacheslav Argenberg, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).

The trade made Byblos Egypt’s oldest and closest foothold on the Asian coast, and for long stretches its kings ruled as something between independent monarchs and Egyptian clients. The depth of that bond surfaces vividly in the fourteenth century BCE, in the diplomatic archive recovered from the Egyptian capital at Amarna. Among those clay letters, more come from the king of Byblos — a ruler named Rib-Hadda — than from any other single correspondent in the file: some sixty or seventy tablets, a torrent of increasingly desperate appeals to the pharaoh as the highland warlord Abdi-Ashirta and his sons pressed in on the coastal cities. Rib-Hadda writes as a man watching his world close on him — likening himself to a bird caught in a snare, begging for archers and grain that rarely come — and he writes, again and again, in the name of his city’s goddess, invoking the Lady of Byblos as no other vassal invokes a god. The help mostly did not arrive. But the letters preserve, better than any monument, what Byblos was: an old port, rich and exposed, bound to Egypt by cedar and by a goddess the Egyptians had long since claimed as their own.

The Lady and the dying lord

That goddess was the heart of the city’s sacred life. The Phoenicians called her Baalat Gebal — the Lady of Byblos — and her name is exactly that, a title hardened into a proper name: not “a lady” but the Lady, the divine mistress of this one place, patron of its kings and guarantor of its harbor. Her temple stood at the center of the tell and was among the oldest continuously used sanctuaries in the Levant, in service, with rebuildings, from the third millennium BCE down into Roman times. The votive offerings dug from its floors — figurines, weapons sheathed in gold, fragments of Egyptian stone vessels inscribed with the names of pharaohs — record nearly three thousand years of people coming to her with their needs.

The Lady of Byblos wore an Egyptian face from very early. To the Egyptians she was Hathor, the cow-horned goddess of love and the sky and the foreign lands, who carried among her titles the epithet Lady of Byblos — so that the Egyptian and the Phoenician goddess of the city named each other in a mirror. On the coins and reliefs of the later periods she stands crowned with the horned sun-disk of Hathor, holding an Egyptian scepter; in still later texts she slides toward Isis, and the Greeks, when they arrived, knew her as Aphrodite. (The learned Phoenician Philo of Byblos, writing in Greek, matched her instead to Dione, for reasons now lost.) Her relation to Astarte, the great Phoenician goddess of love and war worshipped along the whole coast, is debated: a handful of late inscriptions seem to merge the two, but the older evidence keeps them apart, the Lady of Byblos a goddess in her own right, rooted to her city rather than ranging the sea.

Beside the goddess stood a god who died. The Greeks, who took the figure from this coast, called him Adonis — and the name betrays the borrowing, since adon is simply the West Semitic word for “lord,” the same honorific a Phoenician of Byblos would have used for the god himself. At Byblos the dying lord’s cult was bound to the land in a way the later Greek festival never quite was. Each spring the river that runs down from the heights above the city — the stream the Greeks named the Adonis, the modern Nahr Ibrahim — turns red, its water stained by the iron-rich soil washed down in the late-winter rains. The cult read the redness as the god’s blood, flowing down each year from the mountain where the boar had killed him, and the city mourned him as it ran. In the highlands above the source stood a sanctuary at Aphaca where the goddess and her beloved were honored together; the second-century writer Lucian, in his treatise on the Syrian goddess, describes the Byblian mourning and the river’s annual turn to red as the clearest late witness to the rite in its own home.

The mourned youth of Byblos belongs to a wide family of dying gods strung across the ancient Near East — the Mesopotamian Dumuzi, the Tammuz wept for by the women of the temple-cities, the Osiris of Egypt who is killed and dismembered and made king of the dead. (That these figures, and the seasonal death-and-return woven around them, fed the resurrection imagery of later religions is a tracing of motifs across cultures, not a demonstrated line of descent: the resemblances are genuine, but the cults differ exactly where it matters, in whether the god truly rises and in what his rising is for.) Byblos sits at one of the crossing-points of that family. The Egyptian connection is not only iconographic but mythic: in the version of the Osiris story told by Plutarch — set down in his essay On Isis and Osiris in the early second century CE — the chest holding the murdered Osiris floats down the Nile and out to sea and comes ashore at Byblos, where a tree grows up around it and the king of the city, not knowing what it holds, cuts the tree for a pillar of his palace. Isis, searching for her husband, comes to Byblos, takes service in the royal house, and at last has the pillar opened and the body restored to her. Plutarch tells the episode to explain a cult of Isis and Osiris that existed at Byblos in his own day — the city’s old dying-god worship reread, by then, through Egyptian names. The pattern held its shape; only the gods in it changed.

The harbor of Byblos, the small port through which cedar went south to Egypt and papyrus came north toward the Aegean. Photo: O. Mustafin, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The name that became the Bible

The most consequential thing Byblos ever exported was not a thing but a word. The papyrus that came up from Egypt and passed through the city’s harbor on its way to the Greek world carried the city’s name with it. To the Greeks the writing material itself became byblos — papyrus, the pith one wrote on — named, it seems, for the port they got it from. From the material the word slid to the object: a biblion was a roll of the stuff, a written scroll, a book. The plural, ta biblia, meant simply “the books” — and when Greek-speaking Jews and then Christians wanted a name for the collection of writings they held holy, “the books” was the name that served. Ta biblia passed into Latin as a singular, biblia, and into the European languages as the Bible. The chain is long but unbroken: an Egyptian reed, a Phoenician harbor, a Greek word for paper, a word for the thing made of paper, a word for the books, and at the end of it the name of the book the West would call holy above all others. A city that traded in writing material gave its name, by that route, to scripture itself.

There is a second gift of writing here, and it is the harder and the deeper one. The Phoenicians did not invent papyrus, but they did refine, and broadcast across the Mediterranean, the alphabet — the radical compression of writing down to a couple of dozen signs, one per consonant, learnable in an afternoon rather than the years a scribe needed for cuneiform or hieroglyphs. And the single oldest substantial monument of that alphabet was the thing Montet pulled from Tomb V: the sarcophagus of Ahiram, king of Byblos.

The limestone sarcophagus of Ahiram of Byblos, its rim and lid carrying one of the earliest long inscriptions in the Phoenician alphabet. National Museum of Beirut. Photo: O. Mustafin, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The carving shows the dead king enthroned, receiving offerings, with a row of mourning women below; the lid is borne by lions. Around its edge runs a Phoenician inscription of some thirty-odd words, set down by Ahiram’s son Ittobaal to mark his father’s burial — and turning, at the end, into a curse against anyone who would disturb the tomb: let his royal scepter be broken, the text says, let the throne of his kingship be overturned. Of the man himself almost nothing else survives; Ahiram is named in no other source, and the sarcophagus is nearly the whole of his afterlife. The conventional date for the inscription is around 1000 BCE, which would make it the earliest long alphabetic text known, though the dating is genuinely contested: some epigraphers, reading the letterforms against later comparanda, would pull it down a century or two, into the ninth or even eighth century. Either way the stone stands near the head of the alphabet’s history — the script that the Greeks would borrow and fit with vowels, and that, by way of Greek and Aramaic, stands behind Latin and Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic, and the letters on this page. The city that sent the word book into the world also lay close to the source of the letters the books are written in.

Eclipse and recovery

Byblos did not stay first. Through the second millennium its primacy on the coast slipped as younger ports outgrew it — above all Tyre and Sidon to the south, whose fleets and purple-dye works and far western colonies made them the great names of the Phoenician age, the cities that founded Carthage and faced down Assyria and Alexander. Byblos kept its goddess and its harbor and a respectable trade, but the center of Phoenician energy moved down the coast, and the old city settled into the role of the venerable elder rather than the leader. It passed, like the rest of the coast, under one empire after another — Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, then Macedonian after Alexander, then Roman, which gave it a colonnaded street and a small theater and a temple precinct in the imperial style. Under Rome the cult of the Lady and her dying lord still drew worshippers; the spring mourning for the god by the reddening river was still kept. Christianity came, and a bishopric; then the Arab conquest, and the town became Jubayl. The Crusaders took it in 1104, Latinized its name to Gibelet, and raised the squat castle of local sandstone and reused Roman columns that still stands over the ruins. After them the city dwindled to a fishing town, its great past sunk literally underfoot.

It was recovered by the spade. The French scholar Ernest Renan probed the site in 1860; Montet excavated from 1921 to 1924 and found the royal tombs; and Maurice Dunand then worked the tell for four decades, from 1925 into the 1960s, peeling back the stacked centuries layer by layer down to the Neolithic floor. What they exposed is the rare thing the claim of antiquity needs to be more than a boast: a single site where one can walk from a Crusader gate down past Roman pavement and Persian fortification to the foundations of the temple of the Lady and, below even that, the round huts of fisherfolk who lived here before the pyramids. In 1984 the site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, named there for its long entanglement with the birth of the alphabet and for the seven millennia of city stacked in its ground.

The ruins are quiet now, a field of cut stone and column-stumps on a headland with the sea on three sides and the mountains behind, the same mountains whose cedar built the trade and whose iron-stained river ran red for the dying god each spring. Somewhere in the layers below lies the floor where the Lady of Byblos was worshipped while Egypt was still raising its first stone tombs. The name the city gave away has traveled further than any cedar ship: it sits on the spine of the most printed book on earth, a small Lebanese port’s name carried, by way of a Greek word for paper, into the word for scripture.

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