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Byblos History

Byblos, believed to have been the first city of the Phoenicians, achieved its greatest renown beginning in the third millennium DC when it was a busy port used for trade. Ships from throughout the Mediterranean would come to Byblos in search of local materials, as well as those found in other further
-distant lands. Egypt would send gold, papyrus, linen and alabaster, and exchange it all for oil and wood. The trunk and branches from cypress, oak, fir, and especially the famous, huge, and sometimes ancient Lebanese cedar trees that covered the Lebanese coast and nearby highlands, were extremely important materials in the barren and arid parts of the Middle East and North Africa. Byblos continued to be important until the first millennium BC. Following that, it was invaded, as was the whole region, successively by the Persians, Alexander the Great, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, and the Crusaders. Afterwards, many of its ruins were covered over and lost from memory.

Byblos is famous for three basic things: first, along with Acre (Israel) and Damascus (Syria), Byblos claims to be one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world; second, Byblos is believed by many to be the place where an alphabetic phonetic script was developed which grew into the modern alphabets we know today; and third, Byblos got its name from the ancient Greek word for papyrus — bublos (which today means “book”) — because papyrus was delivered to the Greeks from Egypt via the port of Byblos (which also gave its name to the Bible).

The site today, right on the coast in the middle of Jbeil, Lebanon, is 22 miles north of Beirut. It is quite impressive, despite the rough and hodge-podge quality of the remains (one cannot criticize history for the lack of order). Standing proudly above it all is a heavy Crusader castle. Using the rock salvaged from older structures (even columns were used), the Crusaders buift thick outer walls around an equally dense keep. From the roof of one of the outer walls, there is an excellent view over the site, the nearby beaches, and down the coast toward Beirut.

Surrounding the dominant Crusader castle are a wide variety of ruins: the remains of huts from the fifth millennium BC, a few third-millennium-DC temples, tombs and an obelisk temple from the second millennium BC, shrines and a rebuilt theater from Roman times, and, of course, some impressive Medieval waII

The Alphabet

Phoenicia’s greatest contribution to ancient history may be the way in which Phoenician traders helped spread an alphabet — the precursor of our Western alphabet —throughout the Mediterranean world. Many people know that the alphabets we use today grew out of the alphabet used and spread throughout the Mediterranean by the Romans. But what inspired the Romans has its origins in writing systems developed much earlier in Phoenicia.

is believed that the alphabet was only developed in about 1700 to 1500 BC in Phoenicia (and perhaps, as some people believe, more specifically in Byblos. Old pictographic and ideographic systems were used and changed into a real alphabet called the Semitic alphabet. This alphabet developed branches and grew into many of the alphabets used today in the Middle East, Africa, parts of Asia, Europe and the Americas today. One branch of the original Semitic alphabet was Canaanite, which then split into two of its own branches:

Early Hebrew and Phoenician. The Greeks adapted Phoenician and then carried it throughout the Mediterranean. The Romans picked it up and adapted it and then spread it even further. The alphabet we use today is therefore the Roman adaptation of the Greek adaptation of the Phoenician adaptation of the Canaanite branch of the original Semitic alphabet.

The Phoenicians

The Phoenicians formed a reluctant empire. Having first made their mark on the ancient Mediterranean world as consummate merchant traders and then established protected colonial outposts along their shipping byways, they accepted the mantle of imperial power by accident. However, unlike the successive waves of conquest and subjugation led by their marauding contemporaries — Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans — the Phoenicians never really had dreams of domination. Nor, for that matter, were they ever really a nation, or a classic empire.

The earliest record of the Phoenicians is from the 16th century BC, afthough it is believed that around 3000 BC they settled in what became known as Phoenicia (from the Greek name: Phoinikes), an area equivalent to the coast of modern-day Lebanon. A Semitic people perhaps originally from the Persian Gulf area, they turned their backs on the sere land they had crossed and developed one of the earliest ancient and great seafaring Western cuftures, using commerce as their principal motivation and source of influence. In fact, their name for themselves seems to have been Kena’ani (or Canaanites), a word which in Hebrew means "merchants".

The early Phoenicians were constantly subject to the suzerainty of greater powers that vied for control of the Old world. Between the 16th century BC and the I st century AD, these enterprising levanters watched the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Greeks under Alexander, and then the Romans sweep in, exact tribute, and then disappear. Throughout it all they maintained a fierce sense of independence, and often an envied autonomy. The first order of business was... business. As long as the political maneuvering — internal or imposed — did not interfere with trade and prosperity, it did not really matter which throne laid claim to the land.

Nevertheless, not content to suffer the vicissitudes of foreign manipulation and ever wary of the importance of freedom of movement throughout the Mediterranean, the Phoenicians were eager and able colonizers. As early as the 2nd millennium BC, there were Phoenician settlements throughout the Mediterranean. The most important of these was at Carthage, a center that grew to become the biggest city in the western Mediterranean and the principal maritime and commercial center. Eventually, however, conflict with Rome in the 3rd century BC led to its total destruction, dispersion of its forces and people, and, for all practical purposes, the end of the era of Phoenicia’s part in the development of the Mediterranean. ft’s people continued to thrive, trade in their able hands continued to flourish, and despite Phoenicia’s incorporation into the Roman province of Syria, its original eastern city centers at Sidon and Tyre remained self-governing. Still, Rome had become the paramount player in the region.

In short, the Phoenicians were instrumental in establishing and following a pattern that still prevails in Mediterranean (and world) history. They arrived from a foreign land, bringing with them imported knowledge and skills, These they applied to their new environment, adding new cuftural advances learned locally. Having excelled at seafaring in a sea-turned land, they traveled and traded widely, thereby also gathering and spreading knowledge throughout the region. Thus it was the cultures mingled, ushering in a period of growth and development; thus too it was that cultures collided, leading ultimately to the demise of this peripatetic culture.

Ancient Trade Goods

Given the ambitiously grand arena within which the Phoenician traders plied their wares, goods and knowledge from one end of the Mediterranean easily reached the far limits of the other. The prophet Ezekiel in his Biblical foretelling of the fall of one of Phoenicia’s great cities, Tyre, reviews the extensive scope of Phoenician trade, mentioning silver, iron, tin, lead, horses, ebony and ivory, linen, the famous Tyrian purple dye (an extract from sea snails sometimes worth its weight in gold and which when applied to cloth came to be identified with wealth and royalty), coral, honey, spices, oil and precious stones. "These were the merchants of all things," he wrote, "in blue clothes, and embroidered work, and in chests of rich apparel, bound with cords, and made of cedar, among the merchandise.