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89-682: The Phoenician alphabet is an abjad (consonantal alphabet ) used across the Mediterranean civilization of Phoenicia for most of the 1st millennium BC. It was one of the first alphabets, and attested in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region . In the history of writing systems , the Phoenician script also marked the first to have a fixed writing direction —while previous systems were multi-directional, Phoenician

178-562: A Phoenician alphabet of twenty-two characters; an important example is the Ahiram sarcophagus . The use of the alphabet was spread by Phoenician merchants through their maritime trade into parts of North Africa and Europe. One of the most important monuments of this period is the Temple of the Obelisks , dedicated to the Canaanite war god Resheph , but this had fallen into ruins by the time of Alexander

267-451: A Greek mumbo-jumble of גְּבָל ('Gāḇal / Gə b al Gobâl'..., that is, 'Gebal' or 'Jebel'), which shares the same root as גְּבוּל ('Gəḇūl / Gā b ūl, that is 'Gebul' or 'Jabul'), as they're derivatives of ג־ב־ל ('g-ḇ-l' / 'g- b -l' / 'g-v-l'), which means 'twist as a rope', '(be a, set) border' or 'bound(aria)', which tells us that it is a North Boundary of Canaan. Situated approximately 42 km (26 mi) north of Beirut , Byblos holds

356-454: A collection of fossilised fish, sharks, eel, flying fish, and other marine life, some of which are millions of years old. The old medieval part of Byblos is surrounded by walls running about 270m from east to west and 200m from north to south. Byblos Castle was built by the Crusaders in the 12th century. It is located in the archaeological site near the port. Work on the church started during

445-549: A colony and became the foremost city of Phoenicia. Although the archaeological evidence seems to indicate a brief resurgence during the 22nd and 23rd dynasties, it is clear after the Third Intermediate Period the Egyptians started favouring Tyre and Sidon instead of Byblos. Archaeological evidence at Byblos, particularly the five Byblian royal inscriptions dating back to around 1200–1000 BC, shows existence of

534-570: A combination of two 10-tacks, approximately Z-shaped. Larger multiples of ten were formed by grouping the appropriate number of 20s and 10s. There existed several glyph variants for 100 (𐤙). The 100 symbol could be multiplied by a preceding numeral, e.g. the combination of 4 and 100 yielded 400. The system did not contain a numeral zero . Phoenician was prolific. Many of the writing systems in use today can ultimately trace their descent to it, so ultimately to Egyptian hieroglyphs . The Latin , Cyrillic , Armenian and Georgian scripts are derived from

623-606: A critic of Daniels and of the abjad terminology, argues that this terminology can confuse alphabets with "transcription systems", and that there is no reason to relegate the Hebrew, Aramaic or Phoenician alphabets to second-class status as an "incomplete alphabet". However, Daniels's terminology has found acceptance in the linguistic community. The first abjad to gain widespread usage was the Phoenician abjad . Unlike other contemporary scripts, such as cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs ,

712-479: A few dozen symbols to learn. The other scripts of the time, cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs , employed many complex characters and required long professional training to achieve proficiency; which had restricted literacy to a small elite. Another reason for its success was the maritime trading culture of Phoenician merchants, which spread the alphabet into parts of North Africa and Southern Europe. Phoenician inscriptions have been found in archaeological sites at

801-540: A grapheme denotes a complete syllable, that is, either a lone vowel sound or a combination of a vowel sound with one or more consonant sounds. The contrast of abjad versus alphabet has been rejected by other scholars because abjad is also used as a term for the Arabic numeral system. Also, it may be taken as suggesting that consonantal alphabets, in contrast to e.g. the Greek alphabet , were not yet true alphabets. Florian Coulmas ,

890-596: A limited number of distinct vowel glyphs, or both. The name abjad is based on the Arabic alphabet 's first (in its original order ) four letters —  corresponding to a , b , j , and d  —  to replace the more common terms "consonantary" and "consonantal alphabet" in describing the family of scripts classified as " West Semitic ". It is similar to other Semitic languages such as Phoenician , Hebrew and Semitic proto-alphabets: specifically, aleph , bet , gimel , dalet . In Indonesian and Malay ,

979-505: A number of former Phoenician cities and colonies around the Mediterranean, such as Byblos (in present-day Lebanon ) and Carthage in North Africa. Later finds indicate earlier use in Egypt. The alphabet had long-term effects on the social structures of the civilizations that came in contact with it. Its simplicity not only allowed its easy adaptation to multiple languages, but it also allowed

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1068-500: A secondary function as vowel markers, called matres lectionis . This practice was at first rare and limited in scope but became increasingly common and more developed in later times. In the 9th century BC the Greeks adapted the Phoenician script for use in their own language. The phonetic structure of the Greek language created too many ambiguities when vowels went unrepresented, so the script

1157-599: A slightly different route. The basic consonantal symbol was considered to have an inherent "a" vowel sound. Hooks or short lines attached to various parts of the basic letter modify the vowel. In this way, the South Arabian abjad evolved into the Ge'ez abugida of Ethiopia between the 5th century BC and the 5th century AD. Similarly, the Brāhmī abugida of the Indian subcontinent developed around

1246-439: A strong allure for archaeologists due to its accumulations of various strata resulting from countless centuries of human dwelling. The initial excavation was conducted by Ernest Renan in 1860, documented in his work "Mission de Phénicie" (1865–1874) . This was succeeded by Pierre Montet 's efforts from 1921 to 1924, and later by Maurice Dunand , who continued excavations from 1925 for a span of forty years. Renan's expedition

1335-652: A vessel fragment bearing the name of the Second dynasty ruler Khasekhemwy , although this "may easily have reached Byblos through trade and/or at a later period". Objects have been found at Byblos naming the 13th Dynasty Egyptian king Neferhotep I . The rulers of Byblos maintained close relationships with the New Kingdom pharaohs of Ancient Egypt Around 1350 BC, the Amarna letters include 60 letters from Rib-Hadda and his successor Ili-Rapih who were rulers of Byblos, writing to

1424-525: Is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving the vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with alphabets , which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels. The term was introduced in 1990 by Peter T. Daniels . Other terms for the same concept include partial phonemic script , segmentally linear defective phonographic script , consonantary , consonant writing , and consonantal alphabet . Impure abjads represent vowels with either optional diacritics ,

1513-596: Is a direct descendant of these earlier names, although apparently modified by a misunderstanding of the name as the triliteral root GBL or JBL , meaning " mountain ". When the Arabic form of the name is used, it is typically rendered Jbeil , Jbail , or Jbayl in English. All of these, along with Byblos, are etymologically related. During the Crusades , this name appeared in Western records as Gibelet or Giblet . This name

1602-526: Is a further derivation from Sogdian. The Arabic script is a medieval cursive variant of Nabataean , itself an offshoot of Aramaic. It has been proposed, notably by Georg Bühler (1898), that the Brahmi script of India (and by extension the derived Indic alphabets ) was ultimately derived from the Aramaic script, which would make Phoenician the ancestor of virtually every alphabetic writing system in use today, with

1691-499: Is a regional variant of the Phoenician alphabet, so called when used to write early Hebrew . The Samaritan alphabet is a development of Paleo-Hebrew, emerging in the 6th century BC. The South Arabian script may be derived from a stage of the Proto-Sinaitic script predating the mature development of the Phoenician alphabet proper. The Geʽez script developed from South Arabian. The Phoenician alphabet continued to be used by

1780-455: Is almost impossible to understand because they are not related to any living languages. While Gómez-Moreno first pointed to a joined Phoenician-Greek origin, following authors consider that their genesis has no relation to Greek. The most remote script of the group is the Tartessian or Southwest script which could be one or several different scripts. The main bulk of PH inscriptions use, by far,

1869-492: Is derived from Italic, the Cyrillic alphabet from medieval Greek. The Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic scripts are derived from Aramaic (the latter as a medieval cursive variant of Nabataean ). Ge'ez is from South Arabian . Phoenician used a system of acrophony to name letters: a word was chosen with each initial consonant sound, and became the name of the letter for that sound. These names were not arbitrary: each Phoenician letter

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1958-406: Is derived from the Phoenician. With a different phonology, the Greeks adapted the Phoenician script to represent their own sounds, including the vowels absent in Phoenician. It was possibly more important in Greek to write out vowel sounds: Phoenician being a Semitic language, words were based on consonantal roots that permitted extensive removal of vowels without loss of meaning, a feature absent in

2047-460: Is optional and not the dominant (or literate) form. Abugidas mark all vowels (other than the "inherent" vowel ) with a diacritic , a minor attachment to the letter, a standalone glyph , or (in Canadian Aboriginal syllabics ) by rotation of the letter. Some abugidas use a special symbol to suppress the inherent vowel so that the consonant alone can be properly represented. In a syllabary ,

2136-706: The Arabic alphabet . The Hebrew alphabet emerges in the Second Temple period , from around 300 BC, out of the Aramaic alphabet used in the Persian empire. There was, however, a revival of the Phoenician mode of writing later in the Second Temple period, with some instances from the Qumran Caves , such as the Paleo-Hebrew Leviticus scroll dated to the 2nd or 1st century BC. By the 5th century BC, among Jews

2225-480: The Archaic Greek alphabets . The Phoenician alphabet proper uses 22 consonant letters—as an abjad used to write a Semitic language, the vowel sounds were left implicit—though late varieties sometimes used matres lectionis to denote some vowels . As its letters were originally incised using a stylus , their forms are mostly angular and straight, though cursive forms increased in use over time, culminating in

2314-739: The Celtiberian script registers the language of the Celtiberians with a script derived from Northeastern Iberian, an interesting feature is that it was used and developed in times of the Roman conquest, in opposition to the Latin alphabet. Among the distinctive features of Paleohispanic scripts are: ʾ b g d h w z ḥ ṭ y k Abjad An abjad ( / ˈ æ b dʒ æ d / , Arabic : أبجد , Hebrew : אבגד), also abgad ,

2403-682: The County of Tripoli , a Crusader state connected to, but largely independent from, the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem . As Gibelet or Giblet, it came under the rule of the Genoese Embriaco family , who created for themselves the Lordship of Gibelet , first as administrators of the city in the name of the Republic of Genoa , and then as a hereditary fief, undertaking to pay an annual fee to Genoa and

2492-625: The Grand Serail in Beirut . Byblos was chosen by Condé Nast Traveler as the second best city in the Middle East for 2012, beating Tel Aviv and Dubai , and by the World Tourism Organization as the best Arab tourist city for 2013. The Byblos Wax Museum displays wax statues of characters whose dates of origin range from Phoenician times to current days. The Byblos Fossil Museum has

2581-528: The Greek alphabet , which evolved from Phoenician; the Aramaic alphabet , also descended from Phoenician, evolved into the Arabic and Hebrew scripts. It has also been theorised that the Brahmi and subsequent Brahmic scripts of the Indian cultural sphere also descended from Aramaic, effectively uniting most of the world's writing systems under one family, although the theory is disputed. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet

2670-624: The Hebrew Bible as Geval ( גבל ); and in Syriac as GBL ( ܓܒܠ ). The name seems to derive from GB ( 𐤂𐤁 , " well ") and ʾL ( 𐤀𐤋 , " god "), the latter a word that could variously refer to any of the Canaanite gods or to their leader in particular . The name thus seems to have meant the "Well of the God" or "Source of the God". Its present Arabic name Jubayl ( جبيل ) or J ( e ) beil

2759-514: The Indo-European Greek. However, Akkadian cuneiform , which wrote a related Semitic language, did indicate vowels, which suggests the Phoenicians simply accepted the model of the Egyptians, who never wrote vowels. In any case, the Greeks repurposed the Phoenician letters of consonant sounds not present in Greek; each such letter had its name shorn of its leading consonant, and the letter took

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2848-927: The Lebanese American University (LAU) . The LAU Byblos Campus houses the Medical School, the Engineering School, the School of Architecture and Design, the Pharmacy School, which offers the only Pharm.D. Program outside the United States accredited by the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE) , the School of Business, and the School of Arts and Sciences. Byblos is re-emerging as an upscale touristic hub. With its ancient port , Phoenician , Roman, and Crusader ruins, sandy beaches and

2937-625: The Neo-Punic alphabet used in Roman North Africa . The earliest known proto-alphabetic inscriptions are the Proto-Sinaitic script sporadically attested in the Sinai Peninsula and in Canaan in the late Middle and Late Bronze Age . The script was not widely used until the rise of Syro-Hittite states in the 13th and 12th centuries BC. The Phoenician alphabet is a direct continuation of

3026-711: The Northeastern Iberian script , which serves to write Iberian in the levantine coast North of Contestania and in the valle of the river Ebro (Hiber). The Iberic language is also recorded using two other scripts: the Southeastern Iberian script , which is more similar to the Southwest script than to Northeastern Iberian; and a variant of the Ionic Greek Alphabet called the Greco-Iberian alphabet . Finally,

3115-475: The Old Kingdom of Egypt and Middle Kingdom of Egypt Byblos was virtually an Egyptian colony. The growing city was a wealthy one and seems to have been an ally (among "those who are on his waters") of Egypt for many centuries. First Dynasty tombs used timbers from Byblos. One of the oldest Egyptian words for an oceangoing boat was "Byblos ship". Archaeologists have recovered Egyptian -made artifacts as old as

3204-516: The Samaritans and developed into the Samaritan alphabet, that is an immediate continuation of the Phoenician script without intermediate non-Israelite evolutionary stages. The Samaritans have continued to use the script for writing both Hebrew and Aramaic texts until the present day. A comparison of the earliest Samaritan inscriptions and the medieval and modern Samaritan manuscripts clearly indicates that

3293-483: The church of San Lorenzo (Genoa's Cathedral). The Embriaco family's residence, the Byblos Castle , along with the fortified town, served as an important military base for the Crusaders. The remains of the castle are among the most impressive architectural structures now visible in the town centre. The town was taken by Saladin in 1187, re-taken by the Crusaders, and conquered by Baibars in 1266, but it remained in

3382-537: The "Proto-Canaanite" script of the Bronze Age collapse period. The inscriptions found on the Phoenician arrowheads at al-Khader near Bethlehem and dated c.  1100 BC offered the epigraphists the "missing link" between the two. The Ahiram epitaph , whose dating is controversial, engraved on the sarcophagus of king Ahiram in Byblos, Lebanon, one of five known Byblian royal inscriptions , shows essentially

3471-437: The 11th century. The oldest inscriptions are dated to the 10th century. The Phoenician alphabet was deciphered in 1758 by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy , but its relation to the Phoenicians remained unknown until the 19th century. It was at first believed that the script was a direct variation of Egyptian hieroglyphs , which were deciphered by Champollion in the early 19th century. However, scholars could not find any link between

3560-563: The 3rd century BC (from the Aramaic abjad , it has been hypothesized). The other major family of abugidas, Canadian Aboriginal syllabics , was initially developed in the 1840s by missionary and linguist James Evans for the Cree and Ojibwe languages. Evans used features of Devanagari script and Pitman shorthand to create his initial abugida. Later in the 19th century, other missionaries adapted Evans's system to other Canadian aboriginal languages. Canadian syllabics differ from other abugidas in that

3649-551: The 3rd century BC (although some letter shapes did not become standard until the 1st century AD). The Kharosthi script is an Aramaic-derived alphasyllabary used in the Indo-Greek Kingdom in the 3rd century BC. The Syriac alphabet is the derived form of Aramaic used in the early Christian period. The Sogdian alphabet is derived from Syriac. It is in turn an ancestor of the Old Uyghur . The Manichaean alphabet

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3738-557: The Arabic and Hebrew scripts sometimes perform the role of true alphabets rather than abjads when used to write certain Indo-European languages , including Kurdish , Bosnian , Yiddish , and some Romance languages such as Mozarabic , Aragonese , Portuguese , Spanish and Ladino . Byblos It was in Ancient Byblos that the Phoenician alphabet , likely the ancestor of the Greek , Latin and all other Western alphabets,

3827-559: The Arabic root ك‌ت‌ب K-T-B (to write) can be derived the forms كَتَبَ kataba (he wrote), كَتَبْتَ katabta (you (masculine singular) wrote), يَكْتُبُ⁩ yaktubu (he writes), and مَكْتَبَة⁩ maktabah (library). In most cases, the absence of full glyphs for vowels makes the common root clearer, allowing readers to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words from familiar roots (especially in conjunction with context clues) and improving word recognition while reading for practiced readers. By contrast,

3916-452: The Common Era. According to Herodotus , the Phoenician prince Cadmus was accredited with the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet— phoinikeia grammata 'Phoenician letters'—to the Greeks, who adapted it to form their Greek alphabet . Herodotus claims that the Greeks did not know of the Phoenician alphabet before Cadmus. He estimates that Cadmus lived 1600 years before his time, while

4005-665: The Crusades in 1115. It was considered a cathedral and was partially destroyed during an earthquake in AD 1170. It was later given to the Maronite bishop as a gift by Prince Yusuf Shihab . The old mosque by the Castle dates back to the Mamluk period, and adopted the name of Sultan Abdulmejid I after he renovated it. In the southeast section of the historic city, near the entrance of the archaeological site,

4094-556: The Egyptian government. This is mainly due to Rib-Hadda's constant pleas for military assistance from Akhenaten . They also deal with the conquest of neighbouring city-states by the Habiru . It appears Egyptian contact peaked during the 19th dynasty , only to decline during the 20th and 21st dynasties. In addition, when the New Kingdom collapsed in the 11th century BC, Byblos ceased being

4183-575: The Great . In the Assyrian period, Sibittibaal of Byblos became tributary to Tiglath-Pileser III in 738 BC, and in 701 BC, when Sennacherib conquered all Phoenicia , the king of Byblos was Urumilki . Byblos was also subject to Assyrian kings Esarhaddon (r. 681–669 BC) and Ashurbanipal (r. 668–627 BC), under its kings Milkiasaph and Yehawmelek . In the Achaemenid Empire (538–332 BC), Byblos

4272-422: The Greeks kept approximations of the Phoenician names, albeit they did not mean anything to them other than the letters themselves; on the other hand, the Latins (and presumably the Etruscans from whom they borrowed a variant of the Western Greek alphabet ) and the Orthodox Slavs (at least when naming the Cyrillic letters, which came to them from the Greek by way of the Glagolitic ) based their names purely on

4361-448: The Late Chalcolithic period along with multiple burials in tombs and jar handles with impressed signs. According to Lorenzo Nigro , Byblos moved from being a fishermen's village to its earlier urban form at the beginning of the third millennium BC. Early Bronze Age remains were characterised by the development of Byblos combed ware and a lithic assemblage studied by Jacques Cauvin. Watson Mills and Roger Bullard suggest that during

4450-410: The Latin alphabet itself, some early Old Italic alphabet via the Alpine scripts, or the Greek alphabet. Despite this debate, the Runic alphabet is clearly derived from one or more scripts that ultimately trace their roots back to the Phoenician alphabet. The Coptic alphabet is mostly based on the mature Greek alphabet of the Hellenistic period , with a few additional letters for sounds not in Greek at

4539-425: The Phoenician alphabet had been mostly replaced by the Aramaic alphabet as officially used in the Persian empire (which, like all alphabetical writing systems, was itself ultimately a descendant of the Proto-Canaanite script, though through intermediary non-Israelite stages of evolution). The " Jewish square-script " variant now known simply as the Hebrew alphabet evolved directly out of the Aramaic script by about

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4628-400: The Phoenician letter was called bet and had the sound value b . According to a 1904 theory by Theodor Nöldeke , some of the letter names were changed in Phoenician from the Proto-Canaanite script. This includes: Yigael Yadin (1963) went to great lengths to prove that there was actual battle equipment similar to some of the original letter forms named for weapons (samek, zayin). Later,

4717-414: The Phoenician letters for those consonants as well.) The Alphabets of Asia Minor are generally assumed to be offshoots of archaic versions of the Greek alphabet. The Latin alphabet was derived from Old Italic (originally derived from a form of the Greek alphabet), used for Etruscan and other languages. The origin of the Runic alphabet is disputed: the main theories are that it evolved either from

4806-469: The Phoenician script consisted of only a few dozen symbols. This made the script easy to learn, and seafaring Phoenician merchants took the script throughout the then-known world. The Phoenician abjad was a radical simplification of phonetic writing, since hieroglyphics required the writer to pick a hieroglyph starting with the same sound that the writer wanted to write in order to write phonetically, much as man'yōgana ( kanji used solely for phonetic use)

4895-407: The Samaritan script is a static script which was used mainly as a book hand . The Aramaic alphabet, used to write Aramaic , is an early descendant of Phoenician. Aramaic, being the lingua franca of the Middle East, was widely adopted. It later split off into a number of related alphabets, including Hebrew , Syriac , and Nabataean , the latter of which, in its cursive form, became an ancestor of

4984-493: The ancient Greeks and Romans.) According to the writer Philo of Byblos (quoting Sanchuniathon, and quoted in Eusebius ), Byblos was founded by the Phoenician shrine god El (whom the Greeks identified with their god Cronus ). During the 3rd millennium BC, the first signs of a town can be observed, with the remains of well-built houses of uniform size. This was the period when the Canaanite civilization began to develop. Neolithic remains of some buildings can be observed at

5073-420: The ancient city by covering its harbour and town walls with an oil slick that was the result of an oil spill from a nearby power plant. Byblos's inhabitants are predominantly Christian, mostly Maronite , with minorities of Armenian Apostolic , Greek Orthodox , and Greek Catholics . There is also a minority of Shi`i Muslims . It is said that the city of Bint Jbeil ("Daughter of Byblos") in Southern Lebanon

5162-403: The city, though smaller than its neighbours such as Tyrus and Zidonia, was a centre for the cult of Adonis . King Herod of Judaea , known for his extensive building projects, including beyond his own kingdom, constructed a city wall for Byblos. In the 3rd century, a small but impressive theatre was constructed. With the rise of Christianity , a bishopric was established in Byblos, and

5251-467: The common people to learn how to write. This upset the long-standing status of literacy as an exclusive achievement of royal and religious elites, scribes who used their monopoly on information to control the common population. The appearance of Phoenician disintegrated many of these class divisions, although many Middle Eastern kingdoms, such as Assyria , Babylonia and Adiabene , would continue to use cuneiform for legal and liturgical matters well into

5340-401: The consonant-only Phoenician letters. There were also distinct variants of the writing system in different parts of Greece, primarily in how those Phoenician characters that did not have an exact match to Greek sounds were used. The Ionic variant evolved into the standard Greek alphabet, and the Cumae variant into the Italic alphabets (including the Latin alphabet ). The Runic alphabet

5429-412: The following five periods, which were recently expanded and re-calibrated by Yosef Garfinkel to correlate with Tell es-Sultan (Jericho): The site first appears to have been settled during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period, approximately 8800 to 7000 BC (Durand's Early Neolithic). Early Neolithic Byblos was a later settlement than others in the Beqaa Valley such as Labweh and Ard Tlaili . It

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5518-428: The fully developed Phoenician script, although the name "Phoenician" is by convention given to inscriptions beginning in the mid-11th century BC. Beginning in the 9th century BC, adaptations of the Phoenician alphabet thrived, including Greek , Old Italic and Anatolian scripts. The alphabet's attractive innovation was its phonetic nature, in which one sound was represented by one symbol , which meant only

5607-446: The historical adoption of the alphabet by the Greeks was barely 350 years before Herodotus. The Phoenician alphabet was known to the Jewish sages of the Second Temple era , who called it the "Old Hebrew" ( Paleo-Hebrew ) script. The conventional date of 1050 BC for the emergence of the Phoenician script was chosen because there is a gap in the epigraphic record; there are not actually any Phoenician inscriptions securely dated to

5696-421: The initial creation of new alphabets and from gradual pronunciation changes which did not immediately lead to spelling changes. The Phoenician letter forms shown are idealized: actual Phoenician writing is less uniform, with significant variations by era and region. When alphabetic writing began, with the early Greek alphabet , the letter forms were similar but not identical to Phoenician, and vowels were added to

5785-414: The letters' sounds. The Phoenician numeral system consisted of separate symbols for 1, 10, 20, and 100. The sign for 1 was a simple vertical stroke (𐤖). Other numerals up to 9 were formed by adding the appropriate number of such strokes, arranged in groups of three. The symbol for 10 was a horizontal line or tack ( 𐤗 ‎). The sign for 20 (𐤘) could come in different glyph variants, one of them being

5874-463: The middle in building design, a wider range of more developed flint tools and a far larger variety of pottery with fabrication including silica. The Late Chalcolithic featured developments of " Canaanite blades " and fan scrapers. Adult burials in jars started to appear along with metal in the form of one copper hook, found in a jar. Some jars were lined with white plaster that was applied and self-hardened after firing. Copper appeared more frequently in

5963-482: The notable exception of hangul . It is certain that the Aramaic-derived Kharosthi script was present in northern India by the 4th century BC, so that the Aramaic model of alphabetic writing would have been known in the region, but the link from Kharosthi to the slightly younger Brahmi is tenuous. Bühler's suggestion is still entertained in mainstream scholarship, but it has never been proven conclusively, and no definitive scholarly consensus exists. The Greek alphabet

6052-409: The picturesque mountains that surround it make it an ideal tourist destination. The city is known for its fish restaurants, open-air bars, and outdoor cafes. Yachts cruise into its harbor today as they did in the 1960s and 1970s when Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra were regular visitors to the city. Byblos was crowned as the "Arab Tour Capital" for the year 2016 by the Lebanese minister of tourism in

6141-482: The possession of the Embriacos until around 1300. Having voluntarily surrendered to the Mamluks, the city was relatively spared from looting following its capture. Its fortifications were subsequently restored by Baybars . From 1516 until 1918, the town and the whole region became part of the Ottoman Empire . Byblos and all of Lebanon were placed under French Mandate from 1920 until 1943 when Lebanon achieved independence. The 2006 Lebanon War negatively affected

6230-480: The sea, robbed or destroyed. Dwellings were rectangular with plastered floors, pottery was usually Dark faced burnished ware with some shell impressions. The Middle Neolithic was a smaller settlement of no more than 0.15 ha (0.37 acres) adjacent to the older site. The pottery was more developed with red washes and more varied forms and elaborate decorations, buildings were poorer with unplastered floors. The Late Neolithic period showed development from

6319-529: The site. Jacques Cauvin published studies of flint tools from the stratified Neolithic and Chalcolithic sites in 1962. Remains of humans found in Chalcolithic burials have been published by Henri Victor Vallois in 1937. Tombs from this era were discussed by Emir Maurice Chehab in 1950. Early pottery found at the tell was published by E.S. Boynton in 1960 with further studies by R. Erich in 1954 and Van Liere and Henri de Contenson in 1964. Prehistoric settlements at Byblos were divided up by Dunand into

6408-460: The term abjad is synonymous to alphabet . According to the formulations of Peter T. Daniels , abjads differ from alphabets in that only consonants, not vowels, are represented among the basic graphemes . Abjads differ from abugidas , another category defined by Daniels, in that in abjads, the vowel sound is implied by phonology , and where vowel marks exist for the system, such as nikkud for Hebrew and ḥarakāt for Arabic , their use

6497-546: The time. Those additional letters are based on the Demotic script . The Cyrillic script was derived from the late (medieval) Greek alphabet. Some Cyrillic letters (generally for sounds not in medieval Greek) are based on Glagolitic forms. These were an indigenous set of genetically related semisyllabaries , which suited the phonological characteristics of the Tartessian , Iberian and Celtiberian languages. They were deciphered in 1922 by Manuel Gómez-Moreno but their content

6586-478: The town grew rapidly. Although a Sasanian colony is known to have been established in the region following the early Muslim conquests of 636, there is little archaeological evidence for it. Trade with Europe effectively dried up, and it was not until the coming of the First Crusade in 1098 that prosperity returned to Byblos, known then as Gibelet or Giblet. In the 12th and 13th century, Byblos became part of

6675-563: The two writing systems, nor to hieratic or cuneiform. The theories of independent creation ranged from the idea of a single individual conceiving it, to the Hyksos people forming it from corrupt Egyptian. It was eventually discovered that the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet was inspired by the model of hieroglyphs. The chart shows the graphical evolution of Phoenician letter forms into other alphabets. The sound values also changed significantly, both at

6764-477: The value of the now-leading vowel. For example, ʾāleph , which designated a glottal stop in Phoenician, was repurposed to represent the vowel /a/ ; he became /e/ , ḥet became /eː/ (a long vowel), ʿayin became /o/ (because the pharyngeality altered the following vowel), while the two semi-consonants wau and yod became the corresponding high vowels, /u/ and /i/ . (Some dialects of Greek, which did possess /h/ and /w/ , continued to use

6853-545: The vowel is indicated by rotation of the consonantal symbol, with each vowel having a consistent orientation. The abjad form of writing is well-adapted to the morphological structure of the Semitic languages it was developed to write. This is because words in Semitic languages are formed from a root consisting of (usually) three consonants , the vowels being used to indicate inflectional or derived forms. For instance, according to Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic , from

6942-415: The vowel phonemes, although the said non-diacritic vowel letters are also used to write certain consonants, particularly approximants that sound similar to long vowels. A "pure" abjad is exemplified (perhaps) by very early forms of ancient Phoenician , though at some point (at least by the 9th century BC) it and most of the contemporary Semitic abjads had begun to overload a few of the consonant symbols with

7031-410: Was based on an Egyptian hieroglyph representing an Egyptian word; this word was translated into Phoenician (or a closely related Semitic language), then the initial sound of the translated word became the letter's Phoenician value. For example, the second letter of the Phoenician alphabet was based on the Egyptian hieroglyph for "house" (a sketch of a house); the Semitic word for 'house' was bet ; hence

7120-625: Was developed. Eusebius' Onomasticon stated that Byblos was called "Gobel / Gebal" in Hebrew. The name appears as Kebny in Egyptian hieroglyphic records going back to the 4th-dynasty pharaoh Sneferu ( fl.  2600   BC) and as Gubla ( 𒁺𒆷 ) in the Akkadian cuneiform Amarna letters to the 18th-dynasty pharaohs Amenhotep III and IV . In the 1st   millennium   BC, its name appeared in Phoenician and Punic inscriptions as Gebal ( 𐤂𐤁𐤋 , GBL ); in

7209-452: Was founded by those Shi`i Muslims. Byblos has three representatives in the Parliament of Lebanon : two Maronites and one Shi`i Muslim. As of 2022, the religious make-up of the town's 9,247 registered voters were roughly 65.8% Maronite Catholics , 8.7% Armenian Orthodox , 7.2% Shia , 6.3% Sunni , 4.6% Greek Orthodox , and 7.4% others. Byblos is home to the professional schools of

7298-401: Was located on the seaward slope of the larger of the two hills that used to compose ancient Byblos, with a watered valley in between. The original site spread down into the valley and covered an area of 1.2 ha (3.0 acres) providing fertile soils and a protected landing place for boats. Dunand discovered around twenty houses although some of the settlement was suggested to have been lost to

7387-651: Was modified. They did not need letters for the guttural sounds represented by aleph , he , heth or ayin , so these symbols were assigned vocalic values. The letters waw and yod were also adapted into vowel signs; along with he , these were already used as matres lectionis in Phoenician. The major innovation of Greek was to dedicate these symbols exclusively and unambiguously to vowel sounds that could be combined arbitrarily with consonants (as opposed to syllabaries such as Linear B which usually have vowel symbols but cannot combine them with consonants to form arbitrary syllables). Abugidas developed along

7476-522: Was the fourth of four Phoenician vassal kingdoms established by the Persians; the first three being Sidon , Tyr , and Arwad . Hellenistic rule came with the arrival of Alexander the Great in the area in 332 BC. Coinage was in use, and there is abundant evidence of continued trade with other Mediterranean countries. During the Greco-Roman period, the temple of Resheph was elaborately rebuilt, and

7565-507: Was to "provide the evidence that the city did not move and that Gebeil is Byblos". Fragments attributed to the semi-legendary pre- Homeric Phoenician priest Sanchuniathon say Byblos was the first city erected in Phoenicia and was established by the god Cronus . (Cronus was considered the nearest equivalent to the Canaanite Baal / Baal Hammon in the syncretising system used by

7654-472: Was used for Byblos Castle and its associated lordship . The Phoenician City, known to the Greeks as Býblos ( Βύβλος ) and to the Romans as Byblus , was important for their import of papyrus out of Ancient Egypt – to the extent that " Byblos " came to mean "papyrus" in Greek. The English word " Bible ", therefore, ultimately derives from the Greek name of the city, Βύβλος ('Βύblos / Byblos') ,

7743-705: Was used to represent Japanese phonetically before the invention of kana . Phoenician gave rise to a number of new writing systems, including the widely used Aramaic abjad and the Greek alphabet . The Greek alphabet evolved into the modern western alphabets, such as Latin and Cyrillic , while Aramaic became the ancestor of many modern abjads and abugidas of Asia. Impure abjads have characters for some vowels, optional vowel diacritics, or both. The term pure abjad refers to scripts entirely lacking in vowel indicators. However, most modern abjads, such as Arabic , Hebrew , Aramaic , and Pahlavi , are "impure" abjads – that is, they also contain symbols for some of

7832-522: Was widely disseminated outside of the Canaanite sphere by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean, where it was adopted and adapted by other cultures. The Phoenician alphabet proper was used in Ancient Carthage until the 2nd century BC, where it was used to write the Punic language . Its direct descendant scripts include the Aramaic and Samaritan alphabets, several Alphabets of Asia Minor , and

7921-528: Was written horizontally, from right to left. It developed directly from the Proto-Sinaitic script used during the Late Bronze Age , which was derived in turn from Egyptian hieroglyphs . The Phoenician alphabet was used to write Canaanite languages spoken during the Early Iron Age , sub-categorized by historians as Phoenician , Hebrew , Moabite , Ammonite and Edomite , as well as Old Aramaic . It

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