Jbail aka: Byblos, Gebal

37 km north of Beirut, Byblos is one of the top contenders for the “oldest continuously inhabited city” award. According to Phoenician tradition, it was founded by the god El. Although its beginnings are lost in time, modern scholars say the site of Byblos goes back at least 7000 years.

It was the Greeks, some time after 1200 BC, who gave the name “Phoenicia”, referring to coastal area. And they called the city “Byblos” (Papyrus in Greek), because of the importance of this commercial center in the papyrus trade.

Long before Greece and Rome, this ancient town was a powerful, independent city-state with its own kings, culture and flourishing trade. For several thousand years it was called Gubla and later Gebal, while the term Canaan was applied to the coast in general.

The rise and fall of nearly two dozen successive levels of human culture on this site makes it one of the richest archaeological areas in Lebanon.
       

This city is located on the Mediterranean coast of present-day Lebanon, about 26 miles (42 kilometers) north of Beirut. It is attractive to archaeologists because of the successive layers of debris resulting from centuries of human habitation. In 1860, the French writer, Ernest Renan carried out an excavation here, but systematic archaeological investigation did not take place until the 1920s.