A Final Word

Historians do not know how the alphabet was invented, what ship was first navigated by the stars, or who introduced mounted cavalry. So the names of people in this story are not historical: Aleph, Beth, Nun, Zayin, and Resh are taken from the names of letters in the first alphabet. The first two, of course, are contained in this word. The name of King Abishram was formed by combining the names of two known kings of Gebal, Abishmu and Ahiram.

We do know, however, that the prophecies put into the mouth of the Chaldean came true. Gebal, or Byblos, became one of the cities of the Phoenician nation, whose merchant fleets traded all over the Mediterranean and reached as far as Britain and perhaps much farther. Armies based on the Phoenician colony of Carthage threatened Rome. Dido, Queen of Carthage, was one of the first great queens of history and legend. And the simple alphabet of twenty-two letters, which as far as we know was invented and developed in Gebal-Byblos, was the basis of all writing systems used in the modern world, except the Chinese.

If you go to the island of Thira, just north of Crete, you will find a great crater filled by the sea and used as an anchorage for ships. The eruption of the original volcano must have caused the greatest explosion that has yet taken place in civilized times. It is possibly because the results were so catastrophic that its history was never written.

Bebal is now a peaceful little town on the coast of modern Lebanon, where you may see excavations representing every period for the last ten thousand years—including the King’s tomb in dark and white stone, an anchor offered in a Temple, the great walls and the huddled houses, and some of the twenty-two letters.