Several times postponed, and now appearing without some important exhibits, the Byblos, cité millénaire du Liban exhibition at the Institut du Monde arabe in Paris is drawing the attention of French and European audiences to the history of the archaeological site of Byblos, one of many on the coast of what is now Lebanon that bear witness to the successive civilisations that once flourished in this part of the Levant.
Opening on 24 March and running until 23 August this year, the exhibition has been organised jointly by the Institut and the Lebanese ministry of culture – direction générale des antiquités du Liban. It presents material from both European and Lebanese collections, among them the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin, the Louvre in Paris, and public collections in Byblos and Beirut.
Some of the Lebanese exhibits have been held up in Lebanon owing to the current Israeli war on the country, and empty places have been left in the display for when they can be safely brought to Paris. This gives the exhibition an additional layer, linking the history of Lebanon to its present-day suffering and reminding visitors of the obstacles that weigh on making the country’s history better known to the wider world.
The exhibition is a must-see show for anyone interested in the history of Lebanon and the wider Levant, as well as in the important role that the country has long played in commercial and cultural exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean and between this region and Southwest Asia and the European continent.
Located some 40 km north of the Lebanese capital Beirut, Byblos, today named Jbeil, has been inhabited since Neolithic times, and the modern town with its core of Byzantine churches, Crusader-period fortress, and Ottoman buildings bears witness to its long history. Nearby there is the archaeological site, listed by the UN cultural agency UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1984 and dating back to the 6th millennium BCE, which is the subject of the Paris exhibition.
This focuses on some of the earliest years of Byblos’s history and the period of its permanent settlement in the mid to late Bronze Age from around 2500 to 1200 BCE. It therefore corresponds in ancient Egyptian chronology to the end of the First Intermediate Period through the Middle Kingdom and the beginnings and flourishing of the New Kingdom.
While Byblos later played an equally important role in the history of the Levant and of what are now Lebanon and Syria, particularly owing to its role in spreading the ancient Phoenician civilisation that was based in the region, it was already an important centre even before the Phoenicians began their expansionary movement across the Mediterranean in around 900 BCE.
Always more a civilisation than a single state, and one in which Byblos was one of the most important centres along with what are now Tyre and Sidon, the Phoenicians went on to found city-states across the eastern and western Mediterranean, with Carthage in what is now Tunisia, and Marseilles, in what is now the south of France, being perhaps the best known among them.
However, even before the Phoenicians began their Mediterranean expansion, Byblos and some other Levantine centres were already known both for their commercial achievements and for their cultural flourishing. The exhibition picks out two features of this, with the first being the commercial links that tied Bronze Age Byblos and the wider Levant to the ancient Egyptian New Kingdom. The second is the spread of the Phoenician alphabet westwards in a slightly later period such that it eventually formed the basis of those used for ancient Greek and later Latin.
This means that Byblos, like most ancient Phoenician city-states at first a coastal trading station, left important traces on the much larger states in the surrounding region.
Ancient Egypt relied on Byblos for the cedar wood with which to build its shipping, as well as for its role as an important staging post for the export of Egyptian papyrus, essential for almost any form of writing, across the Mediterranean. Ancient Greece in the archaic period adapted the Phoenician alphabet pioneered in Byblos and other Levantine centres to set down its literary and philosophical achievements starting with the poems of Homer sometime in the 8th century BCE.
Contextual history: Installed in the Institut’s main temporary exhibition spaces and across two levels of the building, the exhibition opens with an introductory section placing Byblos in the context of the ancient Levant and eastern Mediterranean.
First settled in the Neolithic period and preserving its identity as a fishing and commercial port into Phoenician times and beyond, the relationships between ancient Byblos and its hinterland and with the wider Mediterranean emerge as main themes of the exhibition. The early population of the region soon discovered markets for the cedar wood that has since become a symbol of the state of Lebanon both eastwards in ancient Mesopotamia and southwards in ancient Egypt.
Neither ancient Mesopotamia, the cradle of multiple ancient civilisations including the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians in what is now Iraq, nor ancient Egypt had significant local resources of wood, and so from the earliest periods onwards they imported cedar from the Levant including Byblos. The exhibition includes correspondence from the so-called Amarna Letters, a set of clay tablets from the king of ancient Byblos, Rib-Hadda, addressed to Egypt’s New Kingdom pharaohs.
Written in ancient Akkadian using cuneiform script and composed around 1360 to 1340 BCE, these letters are now kept in Berlin’s Vorderasiatisches Museum and bear witness to the important network of correspondents kept up by the rulers of ancient Byblos. One tablet on display in the first part of the exhibition apparently apologises to the then Egyptian pharaoh, Amenhotep III, for delays in delivering a consignment of cedar wood owing to hostile action by the nearby Hittite people.
A model of one of the ancient Egyptian Old Kingdom solar boats that were found in pits near the Pyramids on the Giza Plateau and have now been magnificently reconstructed and put on display at the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) reminds visitors to the exhibition of the stakes of this export trade, since such boats, essential for navigation on the Nile as well as for the pharaoh in the afterlife, were made from Levantine cedar wood.
Durable, easy to work, and having a pleasant aromatic smell, cedar wood was highly prized in ancient Egypt for both shipbuilding and construction. It was transported from Byblos to Egypt by boats, which, like most ancient shipping, tended to stay quite close to the shore. In the middle of the first room of the exhibition there is a set of some two dozen anchor stones, lent by the direction générale des antiquités du Liban, and it is easy to see why these should have become a symbol of ancient Byblos owing to its close association with shipping.
Upstairs on the second floor of the exhibition, the display continues with finds made at the archaeological site, many of them testifying to close commercial and cultural relations with ancient Egypt. Among the items found in the remains of the temple of the Phoenician goddess of Baalat Gebal at Byblos, for example, is a bust of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Osorkon I (924-889 BCE), lent by the Louvre Museum to the exhibition, that features Phoenician overwriting on the originally hieroglyphic inscription.
As was so often the case with ancient Mediterranean religions, different civilisations were ready to recognise each other’s deities, and so Baalat Gebal was assimilated by the ancient Egyptians to their own goddess Hathor, the later Phoenicians recognised her as Astarte, and the Romans, last on the scene, saw her as a representation of Venus.
The remains of her temple are in the highest part of the Byblos archaeological site facing the sea, and nearby are those of another temple, called the Temple of the Obelisks and probably dedicated to the god Resheph. This is so-called because a collection of 30 carved stone blocks in the shape of small obelisks was found in the central courtyard. Among the finds is a collection of tiny bronze figures, all of them masculine, decorated with gold leaf and wearing high conical headpieces.
Displayed in a long horizontal display case on the exhibition’s second floor and gleaming like jewels against a dark background under carefully focused lights, the figures are placed opposite another case filled with ancient Egyptian scarabs, also found in the Temple of the Obelisks and dating to between 2000 and 1500 BCE.
Made of various materials including jasper, bronze, and ceramic, the scarabs were apparently “diplomatic gifts” from Egypt to Byblos. Other items found at Byblos showing Egyptian influence, sometimes from newly excavated royal tombs, include jewellery in Egyptian style and statues with inscriptions in Phoenician and Egyptian, such as a fragment of a statue of the pharaoh Shoshenq I (c. 943–922 BCE).
The exhibition continues with an investigation of its second theme, the spread from Byblos of ancient Phoenician writing. Important here is the sarcophagus of Ahiram, an ancient king of Byblos, that was discovered in the royal necropolis at the site in 1922 and is inscribed with one of the earliest known examples of Phoenician writing. At least in the period covered by the exhibition, religious and high-prestige items such as those found in the ancient temples and royal tombs often included inscriptions in both Phoenician and Egyptian hieroglyphs, bearing witness to the influence of ancient Egyptian culture across the region.
Phoenician writing later took off as a model for others to follow – the crucial innovation is that it is an alphabetic script of 22 characters – and the archaic Greeks soon adopted and adapted it in order to write their own language. The exhibition includes a wall panel showing the adaptation of the ancient Phoenician script to write other languages.
The exhibition ends with a brief account of Byblos during the Hellenistic age after the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BCE and in the early Roman period after the region came under Roman rule in the 1st century BCE. During the Hellenistic period, the Levant was part of the Seleucid Empire established by Seleucus, one of Alexander’s generals, who took over territory stretching from the Mediterranean to India. Another general, Ptolemy, took over Egypt.
When the Roman general Pompey had the last Seleucid kings deposed and executed in 64 BCE, the area became the Roman province of Syria. The exhibition ends with one of the most spectacular pieces to have made it to Paris from Lebanon in the shape of a mosaic panel found during the excavation of a 2nd-century CE Roman villa in Byblos depicting the Phoenician princess Europa being borne away to Greece by the ancient Greek god Zeus in the shape of a bull.
Probably most familiar from the version told by the Roman poet Ovid in his book Metamorphoses, the story emphasises the connection between Phoenicia, now Lebanon in the modern Middle East, and Greek and European civilisation.
Europa, a Phoenician princess, later gave her name to the European continent, and her abduction by Zeus in the ancient story figures the movement of people and ideas from east to west and the origin of European civilisation in earlier eastern cultures.
Byblos, cité millénaire du Liban, Institut du Monde arabe, Paris, until 23 August.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 7 May, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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