Between City, King, and Empire: Will the Real “Lady of Byblos” Please Stand Up?

Abstract

Who was the goddess known anciently as the “Lady of Byblos”? Typically, scholars have tried to answer this question by identifying the goddess’s “true” proper name. By contrast, this article emphasizes the goddess’s primary identification by the city of Byblos as a social-political community in order to analyze the Lady of Byblos’s role in shaping Late Bronze Age Byblos’s political landscape, which included imperial, royal, and collective modes of governance. The goddess’s place in Byblos’s political-religious economy thus serves as a fruitful case study for better conceptualizing through the lens of religion the complex range of potential interactions in the ancient world between centralizing and decentralizing political forces as parts of a single social-political system. In this way, the Lady of Byblos may “stand up” not only as an integral member of Byblos’s social order and religious life, but also as an example of the fundamental role that deities played in shaping ancient political realities.