Tribune. In the Sully wing of the Louvre, a letter from the 14th century BC catches the visitor’s attention. The king of Byblos (Jbeil, in present-day Lebanon) addresses the Pharaoh of Egypt there: “If the pharaoh does not send troops, we are dead and the city of Byblos is taken. Today as yesterday and the day before yesterday, she is in anguish. “ Thirty-five centuries later, only the rulers seem to have changed: in the Lebanon of 2020, the abyss is, once again, announced for tomorrow.
In Byblos, we discovered the Phoenician alphabet, at the origin of the Greek and Latin alphabets
Byblos is not just any locality in the Lebanese national novel. The city, classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, symbolizes the epic epic of the Phoenicians, these distant ancestors of the Lebanese. It was in Byblos that the Phoenician alphabet was discovered, at the origin of the Greek and Latin alphabets. It is from the port of the city that these merchant navigators exported the cedar wood and redirected the papyrus imported from Egypt to the rest of the Mediterranean basin.
But if the Phoenicians existed in the eyes of their contemporaries, they themselves did not designate themselves as such. Their name is due to the Greeks. Phenicia was in reality made up of a myriad of city-states distinct from one another: Tire, Sidon, Byblos… It is one thing to question the political coherence of a territory of Antiquity. But wondering if Lebanon exists today, isn’t that a provocation?
Before being a symbol, Lebanon must first be a nation
Lebanon is a founding member of the United Nations (UN), its civil war has been in the news for years; the country has its authors, its cuisine, its artists, its renowned couturiers, its music. Doubt of its existence is all the less allowed as Lebanon occupies a particular symbolic place. For the rest of the world, it is a “bridge between East and West”, a “crossroads of civilizations”, the laboratory of a religious composition rarely encountered elsewhere, a “message”.
However, far from praising a force, this idealized image reveals an original fragility: Lebanon resembles the last-born on which all hopes were based and which bends under a mass of ambitions too heavy for it. Because before being a symbol, the land of the cedar must first of all be a nation: it cannot do without a common history, a people who recognize themselves as such, a set of shared values. . And it is clear that the formation of this nation is not yet complete.
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