Byblos: One of the Oldest Continuously Inhabited Cities

Byblos, the modern town of Jbeil on the coast of Lebanon, was one of the great ports of the ancient Levant and is often described as one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. From the third millennium BC it shipped cedar from the Lebanon mountains to Egypt, and later it became one of the main cities of the Phoenicians. Its Greek name, linked to papyrus, survives in the English word Bible.

A settlement older than history

The headland at Byblos was first occupied by farming and fishing communities in the Neolithic period, with the earliest settlement usually dated to around 7000 BC. Over the following millennia the village grew, and by around 3000 BC it had become a walled town with stone houses, a harbour and temples.

The local name of the city was Gubla in Akkadian cuneiform texts and Gebal in the Hebrew Bible; the modern Arabic name Jbeil continues it. The Greek name Byblos was a later adaptation.

Because the site has been lived on for so long, its layers are deep and mixed. Much of what visitors see today is the Bronze Age city exposed by archaeologists, next to later Roman remains and a twelfth-century Crusader castle built partly from ancient stone.

Cedar for the pharaohs

Egypt had very little good timber, and the tall cedars and firs of Lebanon were ideal for ships, temple doors, coffins and roof beams. Byblos, with a sheltered harbour close to the mountains, became Egypt’s chief supplier. Stone vessels and other objects bearing the names of Egyptian kings have been found at Byblos from the late Early Dynastic period onwards, and finds multiply in the Old Kingdom.

The relationship shaped the city’s culture. The main goddess of Byblos, Baalat Gebal, the “Lady of Byblos”, was identified with the Egyptian goddess Hathor, and Egyptian texts call Hathor the “Lady of Byblos”. Local rulers used Egyptian hieroglyphs and titles on their monuments in the early second millennium BC.

The trade was not one-sided. Byblos also exported oils, wine and resins, and imported gold, linen, papyrus and luxury goods from Egypt. It linked Egypt with Syria, Mesopotamia and the Aegean, which made it wealthy and also a target for invaders.

Temples, tombs and scripts

The most striking monument at Byblos is the Temple of the Obelisks, built in the early second millennium BC. Its courtyard held dozens of small standing stones, or obelisks, set up as offerings; one carries an Egyptian hieroglyphic inscription naming a local official. The excavator Maurice Dunand moved the whole temple to another spot on the site to reach the older L-shaped temple beneath it.

In 1922 a landslide exposed the royal necropolis of Byblos. The shaft tombs of Middle Bronze Age kings, such as Abishemu and his son Ipshemuabi, contained gifts sent by the Egyptian pharaohs Amenemhat III and Amenemhat IV, including an obsidian casket mounted in gold.

Byblos also experimented with writing. A set of inscriptions in the so-called Byblos syllabary, or pseudo-hieroglyphic script, probably dates to the second millennium BC and remains undeciphered. Far more influential was the stone coffin of King Ahiram, found in 1923. Its inscription, usually dated to around 1000 BC, is one of the earliest substantial texts in the Phoenician alphabet, the script from which the Greek and Latin alphabets descend. The sarcophagus of Ahiram is now in the National Museum of Beirut.

Byblos in the Amarna age and after

In the fourteenth century BC, Byblos was a vassal of Egypt. Its king, Rib-Hadda, wrote more letters to the pharaoh than any other ruler in the Amarna letters, a diplomatic archive found in Egypt. In some sixty letters he begged for troops against the expanding kingdom of Amurru and complained that Egypt ignored him. He was eventually driven from his city.

Around 1075 BC an Egyptian text, the Report of Wenamun, describes an envoy of the temple of Amun at Thebes sailing to Byblos to buy cedar. The local king, Zakar-Baal, treats him with little respect and demands payment before the timber is cut, a sign of how far Egyptian power had fallen. Most scholars treat the story as a literary work based on real conditions rather than an official report.

In the Iron Age, Byblos was one of the Phoenician city-states alongside Tyre, Sidon and Arwad, though Tyre and Sidon overtook it in trade and colonisation. It later paid tribute to Assyria and Babylon, became part of the Persian Empire, and opened its gates to Alexander the Great in 332 BC. Under Rome it was a modest provincial town with a theatre and colonnaded streets.

Byblos and the word Bible

The Greek name Byblos is closely tied to papyrus, the writing material made from the stems of an Egyptian reed. In Greek, byblos or biblos came to mean papyrus, and a biblion was a scroll or book. The plural, ta biblia, “the books”, was later used by Greek-speaking Christians for the collection of sacred scriptures, and through Latin it gave English the word Bible.

Scholars usually explain the link by trade: Egyptian papyrus reached the Aegean through Phoenician ports, and Byblos was one of the best known. Whether the city’s name gave the word for papyrus, or the word for papyrus influenced the Greek form of the city’s name, is still discussed. Either way, the connection explains why Byblos is so often mentioned in histories of the book.

The city also played a part in Greek and Roman ideas about religion. Late writers placed the cult of Adonis at Byblos, linking it with the nearby Adonis River, today the Nahr Ibrahim, whose waters turn red with soil in spring. The Phoenician History attributed to Philo of Byblos, a writer of the first and second centuries AD, claimed to preserve ancient local traditions, though how much of it is authentic is debated.

Excavation and rediscovery

The French scholar Ernest Renan examined the site in 1860 during an expedition to Phoenicia. Large-scale excavation began with the Egyptologist Pierre Montet in 1921–1924, who uncovered the royal tombs. Maurice Dunand then directed excavations from 1925 for about fifty years, stripping the mound layer by layer.

Dunand’s work revealed the plan of the Bronze Age town but also removed upper layers that cannot now be studied again, and many results were published only partly. Modern teams continue to re-examine the archives and finds. Byblos was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1984.

By the numbers

Timeline

• c. 7000 BC: First Neolithic settlement on the headland.
• c. 3000 BC: Byblos becomes a walled town trading with Egypt.
• c. 2000–1800 BC: Temple of the Obelisks built; royal tombs with gifts from Amenemhat III and IV.
• c. 1350–1330 BC: Rib-Hadda of Byblos writes to Egypt in the Amarna letters.
• c. 1075 BC: Setting of the Report of Wenamun, an Egyptian envoy seeking cedar.
• c. 1000 BC: Inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram.
• 332 BC: Byblos submits to Alexander the Great.
• 1921–1924: Pierre Montet excavates and finds the royal necropolis.
• 1984: Byblos added to the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Why it matters

Byblos shows how a small coastal city could become a hinge between great civilisations. Its cedar built Egyptian ships and temples, its rulers wrote to pharaohs, and its scribes helped develop the alphabet. Through the Greek word for papyrus, its name is still embedded in one of the most widely read books in the world.