Byblos, called Jbeil in Arabic, has been occupied since roughly 7000 BCE and claims to be among the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the world. It grew rich exporting cedar wood to Egypt and papyrus onwards to Greece, and the Greek word for papyrus and then for book, biblos, comes from the town name. So, indirectly, does the word Bible.
The archaeological site
The excavation is a layered stack of everything: Neolithic dwellings, Bronze Age temples including the Temple of the Obelisks with its field of standing stones, a Phoenician royal necropolis, Roman colonnades and, on top, a crusader castle built in 1103 from stones robbed from all of it. The keep gives the best view over the site and the sea.
The alphabet
The sarcophagus of King Ahiram, found here in 1923 and now in the National Museum in Beirut, carries the oldest substantial inscription in the Phoenician alphabet, from around 1000 BCE. That alphabet, spread by traders, is the ancestor of Greek, Latin, Arabic and Hebrew scripts.
The old town
The medieval souk beside the site has been restored into a pleasant lane of craft shops and cafes, more polished than commercial Lebanese markets but genuinely old. The wax museum and fossil shops are tourist filler; the Church of Saint John Mark, a crusader church from 1115, is not.
The harbour
The small Phoenician port is still in use by fishing boats and is the best place in the town to eat, at one of the restaurants on the quay, with the castle behind. Byblos has beaches on either side of the town and a summer festival of international concerts.
Practicalities
Byblos is 40 km north of Beirut, about an hour by road or by the shared minibuses that run up the coast. Entry to the archaeological site is modest. Half a day is enough, though it makes an easy overnight if you want to eat by the water without driving back.
Egypt and the cedar trade
Byblos was exporting cedar timber to Egypt by the third millennium BCE, and Egyptian objects bearing royal names have been found in the temples here. The relationship went both ways: the local rulers wrote to the pharaohs in Akkadian, and the Amarna letters include correspondence from a king of Byblos begging for military help he did not get.
The excavation
Ernest Renan began work in 1860 and Maurice Dunand excavated for forty years from 1925, removing the layers in sequence and leaving the site as the confusing but honest cross-section visitors see today. Nothing here has been reconstructed for effect.