Les dernières découvertes archéologiques 61 Location and name The promontory of Jbeil which dominates the northern coast of Lebanon, squeezed be- tween the mountains and the sea, was the place where from the 7 th millennium BCE a human community of fshermen and agricul- turalists gave rise to one of the most durable settlements of the Levant. The dominating position of the mound, over the easily land- ing great seashore to the south, fertile but thin coastal plain, the proximity to the mountains, suitable source of timber, and above all the presence of freshwater within the same prom- ontory, are factors which set Byblos amongst the most precocious and innovative Neolithic communities of the ancient Near East, and made it a fourishing city in the Bronze and Iron Ages (Figure 1) 1,2,3,4 . From the 3 rd millennium BCE onwards, the ancient name of the city was Kepny in Egyp- tian * , and Gubal in Akkadian *,5 . In Phoenician, the name is Gebal - Geval in Biblical Hebrew, and it descends from the words gib, ‘well’ and El, ‘god’. This might be related with the ear- liest Bronze Age temple, located immediate- ly west of the deep well in the centre of the promontory and called Enceinte sacrée, dated from 3,400 to 3,050 BCE. The city in Hellen- istic and Roman times was known as Býblos (βυβλος) and became famous for the impor- tation of papyrus from Egypt, a country with Lorenzo Nigro, Professor of Near Eastern and Phoenician Punic Archaeology, Sapienza University of Rome Byblos, an ancient capital of the Levant Figure 1. View of the ruins of Byblos: in the foreground the Temple of the Baalat. * The oldest attestation of this toponym (Kepny) is from the time of the frst pharaoh of the IV Dynasty, Snefru, the builder of the pyramids of Dahshur. During his reign, 40 ships loaded with cedar wood arrived from Byblos.