📷 Soly Moses · Pexels

Where in the world

Lebanon

Byblos

Phoenician-Punic · Lebanon

Field notes

civilizations: Phoenician-Punic
types: Village · City
built: 8,000 BCE
occupied: 8,000 BCE — 100 CE
country: Lebanon

The site

On the Lebanese coast stands Byblos, a Phoenician harbor town whose layers of settlement reach back some ten thousand years, making it one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on Earth. Walk its ruins and you tread through Canaanite, Egyptian, Phoenician, Assyrian, Persian, Hellenistic, Roman and later worlds stacked one atop another. This UNESCO World Heritage Site is where urban life itself took root in the third millennium BCE.

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