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.