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Updated: June 14, 2025
In Phoenician temples women prostituted themselves for hire in the service of religion, believing that by this conduct they propitiated the goddess and won her favour. "It was a law of the Amorites, that she who was about to marry should sit in fornication seven days by the gate." At Byblus the people shaved their heads in the annual mourning for Adonis.
El was the special god of Gebal or Byblus, and was worshipped also with peculiar rites at Carthage. He was reckoned the son of Uranus and the father of Beltis, to whom he delivered over as her especial charge the city of Byblus. Numerous tales were told of him.
This district, it has been said, preserved to the last days of paganism a character which was original and well marked. Within its limits the religious sentiment had more intensity and played a more important part in life than elsewhere in Phoenicia. Byblus was a sort of Phoenician Jerusalem.
Beyrout was now thirteen hours distant, but by making a forced march we reached it in a day, travelling along the shore, past the towns of Jebeil, the ancient Byblus, and Joonieh. The hills about Jebeil produce the celebrated tobacco known in Egypt as the Jebelee, or "mountain" tobacco, which is even superior to the Latakiyeh. Near Beyrout, the mulberry and olive are in the ascendant.
Philo had a certain knowledge of the Phoenician language, and of the Phoenician religious system, but not more than he might have gained by personal communication with the priests of Byblus and Aphaca, who maintained the old worship in, and long after, his day. It is not clear that he drew his statements from any ancient authorities, or from books at all.
Between these were situated Sidon, Berytus, Tripolis, and Byblus. Within this confined territory was concentrated a greater degree of commercial wealth and enterprise, also of manufacturing skill, than could be found in the other parts of the world at the time. Each town was an independent community, having its own surrounding territory, and political constitution and hereditary prince.
Still further north, between Byblus and Tripolis, the bold promontory known to the ancients as Theu-prosopon, and now called the Ras-esh-Shakkah, is still unconquered, and the road has to quit the shore and make its way over the spur by a "wearisome ascent" at some distance inland.
The medley baffles description. I could more easily count with my blind eyes the cells in a honeycomb than refute with my bewildered brain even one shrewd objection. It seems to me that we need our eyes to understand things. We certainly do to taste. Whatever I eat and drink langustae and melons, light Mareotic wine and the dark liquor of Byblus my tongue can scarcely distinguish it.
The other towns which still continued to be of some importance were Aradus, and Gebal or Byblus. These cities, like Tyre and Sidon, retained their native kings, who ruled their several states with little interference from the Persians.
They whispered together, laughing silently, and then sprang ashore, taking with them a rope of twisted ox-hide, a hawser of the ship, and a strong cable of byblus, the papyrus plant. On these ropes they cast a loop and a running knot, a lasso for throwing, so that they might capture the man in safety from a distance.
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