Who ruled Byblos?

Byblos, known in Arabic as Jbeil, is a coastal town about 42 kilometres north of Beirut in Lebanon. First settled perhaps between 8800 and 7000 BCE and continuously inhabited since about 5000 BCE, it grew into a town in the third millennium BCE and is often counted among the oldest cities in the world. For many centuries it was a close ally and trading partner of Egypt, and its royal inscriptions are among the earliest witnesses to the Phoenician alphabet.

The first settlement, from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, covered about 1.2 hectares on the seaward slope of one of two hills, above a watered valley and a sheltered landing place. Its excavator Maurice Dunand found some twenty rectangular houses with plastered floors. Later Neolithic and Chalcolithic villages followed, with burials in jars and the first copper objects. According to the archaeologist Lorenzo Nigro, Byblos turned from a fishermen's village into a town at the start of the third millennium BCE, and the L-shaped Temple was built around 2700 BCE.

Ancient legend, preserved in fragments attributed to the Phoenician priest Sanchuniathon and handed down by Philo of Byblos, made it the first city of Phoenicia, founded by the god El, whom the Greeks equated with Cronus.

Egyptian records name the city as early as the reign of the Fourth Dynasty pharaoh Sneferu, and in Akkadian it was called Gubla. Timber from Byblos went into Egyptian royal tombs of the First Dynasty, and one of the oldest Egyptian words for a seagoing ship meant a "Byblos ship". Some scholars, such as Watson Mills and Roger Bullard, describe it as virtually an Egyptian colony during the Old and Middle Kingdoms, and objects bearing the names of the pharaohs Senusret II and Neferhotep I have been found there. Its rulers stayed close to the New Kingdom pharaohs of Egypt. The Temple of the Obelisks, built between about 1600 and 1200 BCE, held many bronze figurines covered in gold leaf, now in the National Museum in Beirut.

When the New Kingdom collapsed in the eleventh century BCE, Byblos became for a time the foremost city of Phoenicia, until Egypt began to favour Tyre and Sidon. Five royal inscriptions from about 1150 to 950 BCE, among them the text on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram from the royal necropolis, show a Phoenician alphabet of 22 letters, which merchants later spread to North Africa and Europe. Egyptian papyrus passed to the Greeks through its port, so that the Greek word "byblos" took on the meaning of papyrus, and the city's name is the ultimate source of the English word "Bible".

Over the following centuries Byblos was invaded or ruled by Assyrians, Persians, Hellenistic kings and Romans. Herod the Great of Judaea built it a city wall, and a small Roman theatre was added around 218 CE. After the Muslim conquests it came under the Umayyads and Abbasids.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the town, called Gibelet by the Crusaders, belonged to the County of Tripoli. The Genoese Embriaco family governed it, first as agents of the Republic of Genoa and later as hereditary lords, and built a castle of local limestone and reused Roman stones that still stands beside the ancient site. Saladin captured town and castle in 1187 or 1188 and partly dismantled the walls, but the Crusaders recovered Byblos and refortified the castle in 1197. Ayyubid, Mamluk and finally Ottoman forces later held the town.

Ernest Renan carried out the first excavations in 1860, aiming to show that Jbeil was ancient Byblos. Pierre Montet dug there from 1921 to 1924, and Maurice Dunand from 1925 for forty years, working out the sequence of its prehistoric settlements; the castle now houses a site museum. Byblos was under the French Mandate from 1920 and part of independent Lebanon from 1943. During the 2006 war an oil slick from a nearby power plant coated its harbour and walls, and during the 2024 conflict UNESCO gave the World Heritage Site enhanced protection along with 33 other Lebanese cultural sites. Its people today are largely Maronite Christians, with smaller Orthodox, Catholic, Armenian and Muslim communities.