Byblos shows a layered history, from Phoenicians, to Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans, and now hapless Lebanese governments.
The Phoenician “Gebail”, continuously inhabited since 5000 BC, may have been first settled between 10,800 and 9,000 years ago. That would have been before agriculture, at the time of the mysterious ancient hunter-gatherer culture that gave rise to Göbekli Tepe's temple and Jericho's ancient towers.
Much like Japan's Jomon Culture, ancient Phoenicians could reliably rely on fishing. this would have allowed them to settle in cities long before agriculture was developed.
With agriculture, the city then thrived; known to the Greeks as “Byblos”, after its monopoly of book papyrus, the city gave its name to the Christian Bible.
The COP30 phased out language about "phasing out" all "fossil fuels"; here's to the return of scientific objectivity
The more we progress, the greater the risk of a devolution into a #DimAge Already, our own #technology is growing too complex for us to understand or manage, and scales up faster than our own understanding can keep up.
The struggle for Suwayda as the Stalingrad of the Arabs. It is about the future of the Levant & the economic independence of the Arabian peninsula, lest we see a return of Turkish supremacy. The Druze hold Stalingrad or the Arabs lose the Peninsula
