© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/15692124-12341316 Journal of ancient near eastern religions 20 (2020) 225–263 brill.com/jane Between City, King, and Empire: Will the Real “Lady of Byblos” Please Stand Up? Michael J. Stahl College of the Holy Cross, Department of Religious Studies, Worcester, MA, USA mstahl@holycross.edu Abstract Who was the goddess known anciently as the “Lady of Byblos”? Typically, scholars have tried to answer this question by identifying the goddess’s “true” proper name. By contrast, this article emphasizes the goddess’s primary identification by the city of Byblos as a social-political community in order to analyze the Lady of Byblos’s role in shaping Late Bronze Age Byblos’s political landscape, which included imperial, royal, and collective modes of governance. The goddess’s place in Byblos’s political-religious economy thus serves as a fruitful case study for better conceptualizing through the lens of religion the complex range of potential interactions in the ancient world between centralizing and decentralizing political forces as parts of a single social-political sys- tem. In this way, the Lady of Byblos may “stand up” not only as an integral member of Byblos’s social order and religious life, but also as an example of the fundamental role that deities played in shaping ancient political realities. Keywords Lady of Byblos – Byblos – Egypt – Late Bronze Age – Amarna Letters 1 Will the Real Lady of Byblos Please Stand Up?* The city of Byblos, located on the eastern Mediterranean shore in modern- day Lebanon, was home in ancient times to a goddess known as the “Lady of * An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meetings of the American Schools of Oriental Research entitled, “A Divine Ambiguity: Will the Real Lady of Byblos