Lebanon - Byblos

One of the Oldest Cities...

Our tour guide was modest, he described Byblos as one of the oldest cities in the world, not THE oldest, even though it was founded over 10,000 years ago and has been continuously inhabited since 6,000 BC.  It's staggering to think about those numbers.  It's older than all the history I know.

One has to use his imagination here, there isn't much left of the original city to see.  In the early 1900s, two French archaeologists paid off the locals who were living here, razed their houses and slowly began to dig down through the layers of civilization.  They found 17 different layers starting in the Neolithic era and winding through history with the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Crusaders and the Ottomans each leaving a layer or two.  As you can see in this photo, some of the Roman columns are still standing on ground that is twenty feet higher than the original layer.   The Roman columns are made of pure granite, a stone not found in Lebanon.  "Why did they bother to lug these giant granite columns here?" someone asked.  Because they could, our guide responded.  It was a way to show their power.

The biggest standing structure is a Crusades castle built in the 12th century.  The Crusaders plopped it right on top of the intersection of two Roman roads and used local stone and chunks of Roman columns to build it.

From the top of the fort you can get a good overview of the area.

The archaeologists left one contemporary structure to show how the site looked when they began excavation.

Our guide explained how difficult and time consuming it was to excavate the site.  For example, they uncovered a Roman ampitheater but wanted to dig further to see what was below it.  They took it apart stone by stone and reassembled it elsewhere.

The modern city of Byblos surrounds the old, which is protected with a Unesco designation.

 I took a walk down to the port.

Folks were fishing, enjoying the sunshine.