Beirut was selected by the United Nation’s cultural agency to be the world’s book capital of 2009.
Our first words..
Needless to say, the number of books read per capita was not the criteria used to select our city, although this award is technically intended to “promote books and reading”.
We got the award for a completely different reason: Beirut was nominated because of its apparent “focus on cultural diversity, dialogue and tolerance”
Unesco’s Director had this to say of Beirut:
the city of Beirut, which is facing great challenges in terms of peace and peaceful coexistence, is recognized for its commitment to dialogue, which is necessary more than ever in the region, and that the book is able to contribute actively towards this goal.
Hello, my name is Mustapha and I've been blogging about Lebanese society, business and politics since February 2005.
What does that writing in the picture say?
Don,
That’s just the phoenician alphabet
hmm! I wonder if Byblos would not have been a more befitting choice! Byblos, Biblion (a diminutive for “paper, scroll” and the original word for “book,”) Byblos having been the Phoenician port from which Egyptian papyrus was exported to Greece. The port’s name is a Greek sobriquet or corruption of the Phoenician “Gevhal”, lit. “frontier town” (from the Canaanite “Gebhul” which also means “frontier” or “boundary,” for which Arabic has a cognate in “jabal”, “mountain”).
Louis-Noel! Impressive. I didn’t know. Do you know how gevhal became byblos?
I think choosing Lebanon in general is great and well deserving… in the Middle East, Beirut has enjoyed the greatest freedom in book publishing and the most lax censorship laws, Bar None.
That’s a lot of letters for just an alphabet.
My guess is it is some kind of rant against another group of people living nearby.
hehe, good one Don!