Byblos and the Phoenician alphabet

Byblos, inhabited for some seven thousand years, was a Canaanite and Phoenician port that shipped cedar to the pharaohs and papyrus to the Greeks, whose word for books came from its name. The sarcophagus of its king Ahiram, from around 1000 BC, carries the earliest known text in the fully developed Phoenician alphabet, the script from which Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic letters descend.