Byblos through the Ages

Description

Byblos through the Ages by Nina Jidejian – Editions Dar an-Nahar Hard-cover with jacket 29×22.5cm, 209 pages, 1.2 kg. – Check entire Nina Jidejian Books

The year 2000 B.C. ushered in the millennium during which Byblos emerged as a vital commercial, a cultural, and religious center in the eastern Mediterranean world.

The year 2000 of our era, four millennia later, was declared by the United Nations as the international year of culture, peace, and non-violence. Byblos was chosen by Unesco as one of the seven cities in the world to diffuse this message, in keeping with the cultural mission of this outstanding Lebanese archaeological site.

Byblos Through the Ages (1968) was acclaimed by scholars as a valuable contribution to a better understanding of the millennial history of this prestigious site in Lebanon. Several reviews of the book are presented below.

Byblos, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, spans seven thousand years of history. It has been a prehistoric fishing-village, a Bronze Age commercial center, a Roman resort area, and a Crusader outpost. Its location at the focus of trade and cultural exchange in antiquity made it a truly cosmopolitan city with an importance that reached far beyond the limits of the Phoenician coast.

For the past forty-seven years, excavations at the site have uncovered the layers of time deposited there by those who built it. This volume, based on a careful examination of the archaeological evidence and a constant appeal to ancient texts, tells the story of ancient and classical Byblos. From the tiny huts of Neolithic fisherman to the temples of Roman gods, the story of the unusual city is presented here for scholar and layman alike.

William A. Ward – Associate Professor of History – American University of Beirut 1968

With the approval and encouragement of the excavator, Mr. Maurice Dunand, Mrs. Jidejian has written a book that meets the highest standard of up-to-date scholarship while yet presenting an admirably lucid and lively account of the millennial life of this remarkable city.

Georges Hanfmann – Professor of Fine Arts, Harvard University, August 1969

This beautiful volume performs a quite indispensable function. Not only in English, as the author modestly says, but not in any language has there ever appeared a documented survey of the whole results of the excavations of Jubayl. Mrs. Jidejian gathers together all available information from any source, including inscriptions and histories with the relevant parts reproduced in all desirable fullness. But it is chiefly the excavated materials and the artifact-chronology for which her ample footnotes, neatly running along the inner margin instead of at the bottom, furnish a treasury which all archaeologists will acclaim.

Robert North, Orientalia 38, Rome, 1969

Mrs. Jidejian has written an excellent survey, based on primary sources, of the more than 6000 years of Byblos’ history. This is popularization of the finest sort, neither pre-masticated for the reader nor too abstruse for utility. To those who vaguely remember Byblos as part of Phoenicia, this book should come as a revelation.

Alan R. Samuels, Graduate Library School, Pratt Institute Brooklyn, Library Journal (February 1, 1970).

Although much has been published about Byblos, the results are scattered throughout archaeological, historical and philological literature and therefore difficult of access to all but the specialist. Now the long-felt need for a synthesis has been met by Mrs. Jidejian.
This most useful and interesting book concludes with a list of kings of Byblos… High praise must be given to the production of this handsome volume.

Dianna Kirkbride, Antiquity 44, Cambridge, March, 1970

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