The oldest city in the world — Phoenician walls, a Crusader castle on top of a Neolithic settlement, the world's first alphabet, and the finest fresh seafood on the Mediterranean
Byblos (Jbeil in Arabic) is a small city 37km north of Beirut on the Lebanese coast — one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, with Neolithic settlement dated to approximately 8000 BCE and continuous occupation ever since. The UNESCO World Heritage archaeological site contains the layered remains of all the civilisations that passed through: Neolithic, Chalcolithic, Canaanite, Egyptian, Phoenician, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, and Crusader — each sitting on top of the last, with the Crusader castle of the Counts of Tripoli built directly on the ruins of Phoenician…
Byblos was the most important Phoenician port city from approximately 3000 BCE — the primary trading partner of pharaonic Egypt, supplying cedar wood (from the Lebanese mountains) for Egyptian boat-building and temple construction. Egyptian inscriptions in Byblos date from as early as 2800 BCE; the Egyptians called it Kebni. The Phoenician alphabet was developed here in approximately 1050 BCE (the Ahiram Sarcophagus inscription in Byblos is among the earliest known Phoenician alphabetic inscriptions). The Crusaders captured Byblos in 1104 and built the castle that stands today; they called it…