Say you were a time traveler with a time machine that was very expensive to operate – as most of them are, in my experience – and therefore your goal was to experience as much aspects of the ancient world as is possible in one go. Then Byblos would definitely be one of the places to be! Because this city in the eastern Mediterranean was a veritable metropolis of antiquity, where the gates and docks welcomed a varied and marvelous array of political, cultural, and artistic influences. Here you could observe hieroglyphs next to cuneiform writing, read the names of Pharaohs which adorned votive vessels, and find precious ingredients that would eventually end up in mummies.¹

Even though the study of this ancient Levantine port-city, which lay slightly to the north of Beirut in modern Lebanon, may be new to you, you have undoubtedly encountered parts of its legacy.² This is even the case, if you just know the word for bibliography – which I sincerely hope you do – because that term is assumed to have ultimately been derived from the name for the city as it was perceived by the ancient Greeks. Byblos was one of the premier harbors in the eastern Mediterranean where ancient Egyptian goods were shipped.³ It is therefore entirely possible that the ancient Greeks associated the writing material papyrus – which was originally produced in the realm of the Pharaohs – specifically with this settlement. As a result, the ancient Greeks ended up with the word βύβλος (búblos), that denoted papyrus and books, and which in turn inspired our ‘bibliography’, as well as other English words.⁴ And though the modern name is Jubayl, the city is still often designated with its ancient Greek name today. But many of its ancient inhabitants will have called it differently. Including Gubl (/gbl/) in Phoenician, Gubul (/gbl/) in Ugaritic, and Gubla or Gubli in Akkadian.⁵ As this multitude of monikers indicates, Byblos was a bustling settlement that absorbed many of the existent influences of its day. This week we are going to find out how this city came into its prominent position in the first place and hopefully learn a bit more about Byblos than the modern words its name may have inspired.

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A Phoenician City

The area adjacent to the eastern Mediterranean shore that is now called the Levant was already occupied by hunter-gatherers and (semi)sedentary peoples from prehistoric times onwards.⁶ And at the dawn of history, especially in the so-called Early Dynastic Era that lasted from ca. 2900 BCE until ca. 2350 BCE, we can observe that the communities in the ancient Levant had already created complex, urbanized societies that were different from those in the rest of the Mediterranean and Near East. In this area one could practice rainfed agriculture. This was in contrast with, for example, the necessarily irrigated fields that could be found in southern Mesopotamia – roughly the south of modern Iraq – and ancient Egypt. But rainfed agriculture requires a larger area and the polities here had to control relatively large hinterlands. Though, as we saw with Ugarit some weeks ago, the focal point of these polities often remained a single city.⁷ And this was also the case with the port-city of Byblos.

The fortunes of these polities waxed and waned. After a period of decline at the cusp of the second millennium BCE, for example, Byblos and neighboring cities saw many a period of prosperity.⁸ Even though, or perhaps because, the cities and kingdoms of the ancient Levant were throughout their histories often dominated by the larger territorial states in their vicinity. Like the Hittites in Anatolia, and the Ancient Egyptians in – well – Egypt. Many of the local administrative languages in use were therefore seldom native tongues; as far as the surviving evidence tell us, that is.⁹ This changes after the disruptions experienced by the domineering territorial states in Egypt, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia during the Bronze Age Collapse of the twelfth century BCE.¹⁰ Some cities fell, never to recover. But others, including Byblos, would (eventually) enter a period of relative autonomy.¹¹ From this point on, scholars customarily refer to Byblos and the other ancient cities in that part of the eastern Mediterranean as Phoenician, derived from the ancient Greek Φοινίκης (Phoiníkes).¹² Even though there are indications that this name was used by the Greeks before then.¹³ There is some justification for this scholarly tradition, however, as Phoenician now became an administrative language in its own right.¹⁴ In case you are wondering, the Phoenicians would have called themselves Canaanites (Kn’nm), or would simply identify with their home city.¹⁵ And they might as well, because there remained stark regional differences between these polities. In the port-city of Byblos, for instance, the people expressed themselves in a dialect of Phoenician that was in some aspects dissimilar to the more standard form of the language that was spoken in the rival cities of Sidon and Tyrus, which were also situated in modern Lebanon.¹⁶ And this is unsurprising, because Byblos’ path through the history of antiquity was rather unique.

Byblos shared in the venerable pedigree of many of its fellow Phoenician cities, as it was occupied from the beginning of the Bronze Age, which emerged in the Levant around 3300 BCE. The ancient writer Philo of – you guessed it! – Byblos even wrote that it might be the oldest city in the world. He was spectacularly wrong, sadly.¹⁷ But this notion does give us an indication of the reputation that the settlement could already boast in antiquity. And the development of the port-city was both early and astonishing.¹⁸ The first writing found there can be dated to around 2600-2300 BCE. Interestingly, it consisted of a hieroglyphic inscription which spelled the name Baalat-Rum on a locally produced cylinder.¹⁹ And that an Egyptian writing system provides us with the oldest writing found in Byblos should not baffle us. Because Byblos was not only one of the most important crossroads of the ancient world, but for most of its ancient history the Phoenician port-city also had a very special bond with ancient Egypt.²⁰

The Geopolitics of Byblos

The prominent geopolitical position of Byblos, as well as its unique relationship with ancient Egypt, was due to roughly two factors: the natural resources that could be found in the vicinity of the city and the vicissitudes of history, which tend to create their own forward momentum.²¹ Let us start with the resources. The mountainous hinterland of the port-city offered precious minerals, including the rare ore tin. Though Byblos’ most famous export consisted of wood, harvested in the forests controlled by the city. Especially the majestic cedars were in high demand. Not only for timber and building materials, but also for the resin that was used when mummifying dead bodies. The importance of the natural environment to the trading prospects of the city may be hinted at in its name, as the Ugaritic moniker gubul can be translated as ‘mountain’.²² And today the cedar tree adorns the flag of the modern country of Lebanon.²³ Because of this wealth of resources and their many uses in antiquity, we can observe an early and intensive cultural exchange with ancient Egypt.²⁴ A relationship which was subsequently build out over the centuries. But the port-city also lay within the reach of other powerful ancient polities, including those that hailed from Anatolia and Mesopotamia.²⁵ And not all of the resulting international contacts were entirely voluntary.

Because the cities that we call Phoenician from the twelfth century BCE onwards, often found themselves at the mercy of these more powerful neighbors. Their lands were sometimes plundered and entire polities were even incorporated within shifting spheres of influence. Though, this did seldom entirely inhibit the trade that largely characterized the economies of the Phoenician cities at this time.²⁶ Or their freedom of movement, for that matter, as the Phoenicians settled in outposts throughout the Mediterranean, most famously the city of Carthage in North Africa.²⁷ This was in part because the institutions of these cities masterfully navigated the tensions between their would-be overlords. The kings of Byblos, for their part, often managed to cunningly exploit the advantages brought by the need for their resources and their special relationship with the ancient Egyptians.²⁸ When their neighbors eyed their territories, for example, they could try to appeal to the Pharao in Egypt for assistance.²⁹ And through these both profitable and volatile contacts, Byblos became an amalgam of many cultural influences – with an unique ancient Egyptian emphasis, even for a Levantine polity.

Byblos’ Blend

Because of its harbor and widespread, international contacts, Byblos used to be one of the busiest and most important crossroads of the ancient world. It was a place where many of the contemporary cultural influences came together and combined into a unique blend. As such, one of the reasons that Byblos still fascinate us today, certainly has to do with the marvelous material culture that can be found when we scour its archeological remains. And if these are merely the remains, imagine what may have been lost to time and is now inaccessible to us!

Let me present you with some highlights, incomplete as they are. Some of the earliest religious buildings of Byblos were dedicated to the goddess Baalat. The first of these temples is styled like those in Mesopotamia, specifically Khafaji, and the second one could have been transported wholesale from the Netjerikhet complex in ancient Egyptian Saqqara.³⁰ Interestingly, the goddess Baalat was often said to legitimize the rule of Byblos’ kings, a role which was also attributed to the Egyptian goddess Hathor, with whom Baalat was often identified.³¹ And then there is the plethora of objects that were either imported from Egypt or were made to imitate the styles employed in the realm of the Pharaohs.³² If one wanted for scarabs, for example, one had ample choice from a number of production sites!³³ Especially curious are the (votive) vessels which carried the name of many of the pharaohs that ruled the land of the Nile in its long and storied history.³⁴ And ancient Egypt also inspired, how morbid that word may sound in this context, the design of some impressive Byblian tombs.³⁵ Such regular and multifaceted cross-fertilization creates its own dynamic, and the entwinement between ancient Egypt and Byblos remained strong for centuries – even if there were long periods wherein both polities had problems that inhibited their more direct cooperation.³⁶  

But as the first, Mesopotamian-styled temple for Baalat already indicated, Egypt was far from the only influence on Byblos. Even if it was only to transport Egyptian wares further afield, Byblos could not escape the pull of the rest of the Near East. Apart from the adoption of the ideas, material culture, and writing systems from Mesopotamia there were, for instance, extensive contacts with the cities and states around the upper-Euphrates river.³⁷ And the religious practices of Byblos, including the deities that were revered, were not only indebted to Egypt, but also the wider Levant.³⁸ And then there was the Aegean world. Not only did papyrus reach the ancient Greeks through Byblos, but Aegean objects also found their way into the port-city itself.³⁹ And thus we have brought this blog back to where we began.

But the Phoenicians would not manage to navigate the currents between the larger states in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East forever. Byblos and the other Phoenician cities would eventually find themselves as part of extensive empires, which exerted a more direct control than the earlier hegemons of the Bronze Age. Such as the Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Empires – and that is only the rulers before the advent of our common era!⁴⁰ But the fate of Byblos in those epochs is regrettably a story for another time.

Conclusion: An Incomplete History

There is so much left to say about Byblos, even if we confine ourselves to antiquity. The clever way in which they transported the large tree trunks from the mountains to their harbor for example. And how these trunks would subsequently be ferried to Egypt.⁴¹ What is more, the history of Byblos did not even end in antiquity, for crying out loud! But that is how far we will go today. And perhaps in the future, when we find ourself discussing the Middle Ages, we may have to visit an old friend at the shores of the eastern Mediterranean

Making the human past accessible, can be a difficult task. Even the cute anecdote about the many names of the city of Byblos and the modern words these inspired, required – as you may have noticed – two extensive footnotes, in order to convey but a small part of the nuances scholars have found with regard to these matters. But luckily, the modern scholarly endeavor consists of cooperation and standing on each other’s shoulders, as the humanities take our knowledge of the deep past further than ever before. The digital humanities have become increasingly important in this regard. Therefore, as I promised a while ago, we will discuss the advent of AI in Assyriology in two week’s time – and no, I will not let that blog be written by a chatbot!

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References

1. Josette Elayi, The History of Phoenicia, Translated by Andrew Plummer (Atlanta: Lockwood Press, 2018), p. 32-57.
2. Marwan Kilani, Byblos in the Late Bronze Age: Interactions between the Levantine and Egyptian Worlds (Leiden: Brill, 2020), p. 200.
3. Nathan Wasserman & Yigal Bloch, The Amorites: A Political History of Mesopotamia in the Early Second Millennium BCE (Leiden: Brill, 2023), p. 406.
4. Angus Stevenson (ed.), Oxford Dictionary of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 161. Though it has been suggested that a previously existing variation of the word búblos inspired the ancient Greek name for the city, instead of the other way around, see: Robert S.P. Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Assisted by Lucien van Beek (Leiden: Brill 2010), p. 246-247. At the moment I do not find this thesis convincing, however, as arguable connections have been made between the city’s name in ancient Semitic languages like Phoenician, Ugaritic, and Akkadian, and the ancient Greek name. Such connections, which I discuss in the following note, imply that the Semitic names inspired the Greek one. This would make it implausible – though not impossible! – that it were the ancient Greeks who named Byblos after the word they already used to denote papyrus and books.
5. The name Gubl is thought to have become Byblos in ancient Greek through the reconstructed form *Gyblos, as noted by Holger Gzella in his introductory course on the Phoenician language in the summer of 2012, wherein he discussed the inscription on the Batnu’m Sarcophagus. For the names in Phoenician, Ugaritic, and Akkadian, see: Kilani, Byblos in the Late Bronze Age, p. 185; Rebecca Hasselbach, “Phoenician Case in Typological Context”, in: Robert D. Holmstedt & Aaron Schade (eds.), Linguistic studies in Phoenician Grammar: In Memory of J. Brian Peckham (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2013), p. 210, note 13. The Akkadian variations do not, to the best of my knowledge, indicate mere genitive and accusative case endings of a hypothetical name *Gublu. Because in the examples we have, these variations mostly do not seem to comply with their assumed case, i.e. see: Kilani, Byblos in the Late Bronze Age, p. 147, notes 42-43, p. 164, note 88. For an exception to this observation, see: Ibidem, p. 185. Though this may be due to the peculiarities of the type of Akkadian in which our sources were written, see: Maarten G. Kossmann, “The Case system of West-Semitized Amarna Akkadian”, Jaarbericht van het Vooraziatisch-Egyptisch Genootschap Ex Oriente Lux 1989, 30 (1), p. 40. Another possibility may be (the beginning of) a deterioration of the case system itself, see: Ibidem, p. 42.
6. Hermann Genz, “The Northern Levant”, in: Daniel Potts (ed.), A Companion to the Archeology of the Ancient Near East (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2012), p. 609-621; Elayi, The History of Phoenicia, p. 30.
7. Marc van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), p. 59.
8. Roger Matthews, “Peoples and Complex Societies in Ancient Southwest Asia”, in: Chris Scarre (ed.), The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018), p. 452.
9. Holger Gzella, “The Linguistic Position of Old Byblian”, in: Robert D. Holmstedt & Aaron Schade (eds.), Linguistic studies in Phoenician Grammar: In Memory of J. Brian Peckham (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2013), p. 170.
10. Guy D. Middleton, “Getting Closer to the Late Bronze Age Collapse in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean c. 1200 BC”, Antiquity 2024, 98 (397), p. 260.
11. Holger Gzella, “Phoenician”, in: Holger Gzella (red.), Languages from the World of the Bible (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), p. 55.
12. Mario Liverani, The Ancient Near East: History, Society and Economy, Translated by Soraia Tabatabai (New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), p. 420. For the scholarly discussions about the meaning of this name, see: Elayi, The History of Phoenicia, p. 4-5.
13. Ibidem, p. 4.
14. Gzella, “Phoenician”, p. 55.
15. Liverani, The Ancient Near East, 420; Dexter Hoyos, The Carthaginians (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), p. 1.
16. Gzella, “Phoenician”, p. 55; Robert D. Holmstedt & Aaron Schade, “Introduction”, in: Robert D. Holmstedt & Aaron Schade (eds.), Linguistic studies in Phoenician Grammar: In Memory of J. Brian Peckham (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2013), p. 3. For a brief overview of what we know about this dialect, see: Gzella, “The Linguistic Position of Old Byblian”, p. 170-198.
17. Elayi, The History of Phoenicia, p. 32.
18. Liverani, The Ancient Near East, 47.
19. Elayi, The History of Phoenicia, p. 32.
20. Kathryn A. Bard, An Introduction to the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt.(Malden: Blackwell, 2009), p. 171; Elayi, The History of Phoenicia, p. 32-57; Marc van de Mieroop, A History of Ancient Egypt (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), p. 49, 51.
21. Elayi, The History of Phoenicia, p. 32-35; Liverani, The Ancient Near East, 235-236; Kilani, Byblos in the Late Bronze Age, p. 202-216. For the natural environment, see: Genz, “The Northern Levant”, p. 607-608.
22. Gregorio del Olmo Lete & Joaquín Sanmartín, A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition: Volume 1, Translated by Wilfred G.E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2003), p. 293; Kilani, Byblos in the Late Bronze Age, p. 193, note 126.
23. Elayi, The History of Phoenicia, p. 33.
24. Van de Mieroop, A History of Ancient Egypt, p. 49, 51, 72, 117.
25. Elayi, The History of Phoenicia, p. 49-51; Gzella, “Phoenician”, p. 55.
26. Liverani, The Ancient Near East, 329.
27. Peter M.M.G. Akkermans & Glenn M. Schwartz, The Archaeology of Syria: From Complex Hunter-Gatherers to Early Urban Societies (c. 16,000 – 300 BC) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 386. For Carthage, see: Hoyos, The Carthaginians.
28. Van de Mieroop, A History of Ancient Egypt, p. 189, 191; Hoyos, The Carthaginians, p. 1.
29. Thomas Nikade, “Egypt and the Near East”, in: Daniel Potts (ed.), A Companion to the Archeology of the Ancient Near East (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2012), p. 839; Liverani, The Ancient Near East, 335. For the correspondence of the contemporary Levantine kings, see: Peter Pfälzner, “Levantine Kingdoms of the Late Bronze Age”, in: Daniel Potts (ed.), A Companion to the Archeology of the Ancient Near East (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2012), p. 772-774.
30. Elayi, The History of Phoenicia, p. 37-38. Though the archeological picture is perhaps not as straightforward as it seems, see: Genz, “The Northern Levant”, p. 624.
31. Elayi, The History of Phoenicia, p. 39.
32. Akkermans & Schwartz, The Archaeology of Syria, p. 240.
33. Nikade, “Egypt and the Near East”, p. 840; Kilani, Byblos in the Late Bronze Age, p. 28-29.
34. Elayi, The History of Phoenicia, p. 40. For hypothesized animosity, see: Genz, “The Northern Levant”, p. 609.
35. Akkermans & Schwartz, The Archaeology of Syria, p. 323.
36. Liverani, The Ancient Near East, 421; Genz, “The Northern Levant”, p. 609.
37. Liverani, The Ancient Near East, 130-131. And its perhaps through these contacts that ancient Egyptian wares found their way to the upper-Euphrates city of Ebla, see: Ibidem, p. 236.
38. Karel van der Toorn, “Theology, Priests, and Worship in Canaan and ancient Israel”, in: Jack M. Sasson (ed.), Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995), p. 2047.
39. Annie Caubet, “Art and Architecture in Canaan and Ancient Israel”, in: Jack M. Sasson (ed.), Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995), p. 2683.
40. Elayi, The History of Phoenicia, p. 104-283; Liverani, The Ancient Near East, 422, 431-433. Consider this your periodical reminder to think of the Roman Empire!
41. Elayi, The History of Phoenicia, p. 34-37.