The Lion’s gate and the Persian wall in Byblos Opening the doors of digital representation to the Cultural Heritage of a resilient city in Lebanon Simone Garagnani School of Engineering and Architecture Alma Mater University of Bologna Bologna, Italy simone.garagnani@unibo.it Luisa Bravo School of Architecture and Design LAU, Lebanese American University Beirut, Lebanon luisa.bravo@lau.edu.lb José Manuel Pagés Madrigal School of Architecture and Design LAU, Lebanese American University Beirut, Lebanon josemanuel.madrigal@lau.edu.lb Abstract— Byblos, modern Jbeil, is a northern Lebanese city considered as one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities since Neolithic times, designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1984. Thus, the archaeological area, strictly surrounded by city boundaries, is the result of several civilizations that came over the centuries producing many layers of architectural buildings now in precarious state of conservation. The recent nomination of Byblos as one of the “100 Resilient Cities”, a project pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation, fostered some new intents aimed at the preservation of the urban space and the archaeological site. In order to support a possible valorization strategy, the Lion’s gate at the Persian wall has been chosen as a case study to experiment how digital photogrammetric modeling of meaningful remains can improve dissemination of cultural legacy to remote visitors and transfer knowledge to town planners. This paper presents the preliminary research, which is supposed to be integrated by some more detailed surveys in the near future, in order to populate a shared web repository in which scholars, tourists and planners will find useful information on the archaeological park. Index Terms—Cultural heritage preservation, digital photogrammetry, 3D modeling, preliminary survey, resilient city, urban space, virtual museums. I. INTRODUCTION Byblos is known as one of the most important Phoenician cities located in Lebanon, between Beirut and Tripoli. As one of the most ancient city on Earth, inhabited since Neolithic times, Byblos has been closely linked to the legends and history of the Mediterranean Region. Sixteen different layers can be identified in the urban palimpsest: Neolithic and Bronze Age, Persians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans and Crusaders are the most well represented civilizations but not the only ones. The current spatial configuration of the main archaeological site (Fig. 1) is the result of several excavations started by E. Renan in 1864 [1] and definitively suspended in the late ‘60s of the last century, with the later application of the “method de fouille et chronologie” excavations by M. Dunand [2]. A huge quantity of soil was removed, during those works, to uncover the buried levels of respective civilizations. This volume was thrown to the sea provoking a relevant alteration of the topographic profile, especially along the coastline. A few works were subsequently developed for the rehabilitation of the site. Current visits are nowadays mostly based on the project developed by the University of Quebec and the Quebecoise Regional Government. However these works present the place from a diachronic perspective, without special information except the placards that are still close to the most important monuments. Results were implemented by the creation of a new local museum within the Castle as the best reference for such pieces. Even the accessibility layout is somehow faulty: the main entrance, close to the medieval walls, generates an undefined sector for the conventional visitors, which reveals to them the configuration of the Persian walls crossing the souk aside of an undefined zone near the Crusader Castle. At the same time, the Fig. 1. The archaeological area in Byblos, modern Jbeil. The “Roman path” is the recognizable connection between the remains of the old town and the contemporary city: it leads to the “Souk” zone, which is the old market place directly linked to the site entrance. Fig. 2. The archaeological remains in the old “souk” (top image) and the Ottoman House (bottom image, to the right), a landmark in front of the sea at the archeological site.