Byblos and the cedar trade

Byblos on the Lebanese coast is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities, and its chief commodity grows on the mountains at its back: the cedar of Lebanon, straight, resinous, and nearly immune to rot. Egypt, which has no timber of its own, buys logs here for centuries—for temples, ships and sarcophagi—sending back gold, papyrus and cloth. Through Byblos the Greeks would later take their very word for book, biblos, the papyrus scroll—from which the Bible has its name. With this same cedar, as the Tanakh tells it, Hiram of Tyre would supply Shlomo for the building of the Temple in Jerusalem.