Byblos

Writing itself owes a debt to Byblos: the Phoenician alphabet, ancestor of most scripts in use today, is bound to this harbour town, which even gave the Greeks their word for book. Occupied since the Neolithic, its mound stacks Bronze Age temples, Persian ramparts, Roman colonnades, a Crusader castle and an Ottoman-era souk in one compact shoreline site. UNESCO inscribed Byblos in 1984 among the oldest continuously inhabited cities anywhere.