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The Phoenicians and the Cedars of the Lord
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Cedars of Lebanon
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Lebanon, the land of the Cedars
Lebanon is a small country located on the East coast of the Mediterranean Sea, Lebanon is located at the meeting point of three continents: Europe, Asia and Africa. Lebanon has been the crossroad of many civilizations the traces of which can still be seen today. Its countryside is a place of rocks, cedar trees and magnificent ruins that look down from the mountains to the sea.
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Cedars of Lebanon
Cedars are among the last survivors of the immense forests that lay across Mount Lebanon in ancient times. The most famous cedar forest is the one located in Bsharreh region, North Lebanon and also known as the Cedars of the Lord.
The Cedar forest in Bsharreh contains about 375 trees, some between 1200 and 2000 years old. They stand on slopes 6000 ft high in the shadow of the 10000 ft peak of Qernet Es-sawda.
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Who are the Phoenicians?
The Canaanites who inhabited that Estern coasts of Lebanon and Syria were called Phoenicians by the Greeks after the unique purple dye the Phoenicians produced from murex seashells. The Phoenicians mastered the art of navigation and dominated the Mediterranean Sea trade for around 500 years. They excelled in producing textiles, carving ivory, working with metal and glass. The Phoenicians built several local cities East Mediterranean among which: Byblos, Tyre, Sidon, Berytus, Tripoli, Arvad, Baalbek and Caesarea.
They established trade routes to Europe and Western Asia. Phoenician ships circumnavigated Africa a thousand years before those of the Portuguese. They founded colonies wherever they went in North and South Mediterranean; in Cyprus, Rhodes, Crete, Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, Marseilles, Cadiz, and Carthage around the first Millennium B.C.
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Screen Shot: Project BOB
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Building Temple od Solomon and King Davids Palace
The Phoenician king Hiram of Tyre (989-936 BC) built a palace for David and two palaces and a temple for Solomon. The Bible provides a vast amount of information about them.
Inventing the Alphabet
Around 1600 B.C. the Phoenicians invented the fisrt alphabet, and passed them onto the world. The Phoenicians gave the alphabet to the Greeks who adopted it which led to the Latin letters of present-day
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