Mount Lebanon

The Akkadian name of Mount Lebanon, Labnānu, the mountain and its cedar forest, on the same lbn root as the Hebrew. Mesopotamian kings from the third millennium onward recorded importing its cedar, the timber no tree of the alluvial south could supply, and the Assyrian monarchs who reached the Levant boasted of felling it. In literature, the Cedar Forest that Gilgamesh and Enkidu enter to kill its guardian Ḫumbaba is, in the standard Babylonian version, commonly located on it.

The Akkadian form shows the name already fixed and famous a thousand miles from the mountain itself. For landlocked Babylonia, Labnānu was less a place than a destination of legend, the source of the great timber and the setting of an epic journey to the edge of the known world. The mountain was a name for “where the cedar comes from” long before it was anywhere most of its namers had stood.

The Ugaritic name of Mount Lebanon, lbnn, written in the alphabetic cuneiform of Ugarit, the port-city just up the coast from the mountain. It appears in the Baal Cycle, where the craftsman-god Kothar-wa-Khasis builds Baal’s palace on Mount Ṣapānu with cedar fetched from lbnn and šryn, Lebanon and Sirion, the two ranges that wall the Beqaa.

This is the earliest alphabetic attestation of the name, from a people living almost beneath the mountain and trading its timber. The pairing of lbnn with šryn is exactly the one the Hebrew Bible makes centuries later, Lebanon and Sirion together (Deuteronomy 3:9, Psalm 29:6), evidence of how stable the geography and its names already were in the Late Bronze Age. The cedar mountain is named, beside its neighbor and in the same poetic breath, in the oldest alphabetic literature that survives.

The Hebrew name of Mount Lebanon, Lᵊḇānōn, from the root lbn, “white,” for the snow on its heights and the pale limestone of its slopes. Its cedars build Solomon’s temple and palace (1 Kings 5), and in Hebrew poetry the mountain is a fixed image of height, fragrance, and strength, its trees the tallest things the writers knew. It stands paired in scripture with Sirion and Hermon, the ranges of the Anti-Lebanon across the valley.

The root lbn is fully transparent in Hebrew and runs through the whole word-family: lᵊḇānāh, “the moon”; lᵊḇēnāh, “brick”; lᵊḇōnāh, “frankincense,” the white resin. The cedar mountain, then, is named not for its famous trees but for its colour, the white of its winters. It is the same root, and the same logic of naming-by-whiteness, that the Akkadian, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Syriac, and Arabic names all share, the most consistent single etymology in this atlas.

The Phoenician name of the mountain, lbnn, attested in the Baal-Lebanon inscription (KAI 31), fragments of a bronze bowl from Cyprus dedicated by a governor of Qarthadasht to Baʿal Lᵊbanōn, “Baal of Lebanon,” about the eighth century BCE. The form is the home-coast version of the name, in the language of the very people who lived below the range and felled its cedars for the timber trade that made their cities rich.

The Phoenician lbnn is the local headwater that the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin forms all sit downstream of. The Phoenicians were the middlemen of the cedar trade and the carriers of the alphabet; it was through contact with them that the Greeks took the name west as Líbanos. The cedar-sellers’ own word for their mountain stands, in this atlas, just beside the Greek that borrowed it.

The Greek name of the mountain, Líbanos, borrowed from the Semitic; Theophrastus writes of its cedars and Strabo of the two parallel ranges, Líbanos and Antilíbanos, with the Beqaa between them. The Greek takes over the consonants of the lbn name but not its sense: “white” is invisible in Greek, and Líbanos is simply an opaque foreign place-name.

By coincidence the borrowing collides with an ordinary Greek word, líbanos, “frankincense,” itself a Semitic loan, from Hebrew lᵊḇōnāh, the white resin, also built on lbn. So the mountain and the incense are homonyms in Greek, both descended at the root from the same Semitic “white” yet naming entirely different things, a range in the north and a gum traded up from the south. The white that names them both is legible in neither’s Greek form; Greek borrowed the white mountain and the white resin under one sound and kept the whiteness of neither.

The Latin name of the mountain, Libanus, taken from the Greek Líbanos; Pliny and Tacitus describe the range and its famous snow-fed springs, and the Vulgate uses Libanus throughout for the biblical Lebanon. The Latin keeps the Greek’s opacity: the “white” of the original is as lost in Latin as it was in Greek.

Through the Vulgate’s Libanus the name entered medieval and modern Western European usage, the standard learned form before the modern Lebanon (which descends instead from the Semitic vocalization). The mountain thus reaches the West twice over, once as the scholars’ Libanus by way of Greek and Latin, and once as Lebanon by way of the living Semitic name, the same lbn arriving by two different roads.

The Syriac name of the mountain, Lebnān, in the Peshitta and Syriac literature; the Aramaic continuation of the lbn name in the language spoken nearest the range in late antiquity. Like the Arabic and unlike the Greek and Latin, the Syriac keeps the root alive, the “white” still audible to its speakers.

The Syriac form sits in an unbroken Semitic line between the biblical Hebrew Lᵊḇānōn and the Arabic Lubnān, three cognate names for one mountain spoken in sequence down the same coast across three thousand years. It is among the clearest cases in this atlas of a name held continuously, in living cognate forms, by the people of its own place, from the Bronze Age Ugaritic lbnn to the modern Lubnān, the whiteness of the heights named in the same root the whole way through.

The Arabic name of the mountain, Lubnān, continuing the Semitic lbn root directly rather than through Greek; Yāqūt describes its snows, its springs, and the ascetics who withdrew to it. The root remains live in Arabic, laban “milk,” lubnī “of milk-whiteness,” so that to its Arabic namers the mountain was still transparently the “white” one in a way it had never been to the Greeks and Romans.

This is the form that survived into the modern world as the name of a country. Where the learned West kept the Greek-Latin Libanus, the living name on the mountain itself ran on in Arabic as Lubnān, and it is from this Semitic line, not the classical one, that the modern Lebanon descends. The oldest sense of the name, the white of the heights, stayed legible longest in the language spoken nearest it.