The Lion's Gate and the Persian Wall in Byblos - Opening the Doors of Digital Representation to the Cultural Heritage of a Resilient City in Lebanon

Abstract

Byblos, modern Jbeil, is a northern Lebanese city considered as one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities since Neolithic times, designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1984. Thus, the archaeological area, strictly surrounded by city boundaries, is the result of several civilizations that came over the centuries producing many layers of architectural buildings now in precarious state of conservation. The recent nomination of Byblos as one of the ''100 Resilient Cities'', a project pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation, fostered some new intents aimed at the preservation of the urban space and the archaeological site. In order to support a possible valorization strategy, the Lion's Gate at the Persian Wall has been chosen as a case study to experiment how digital photogrammetric modeling of meaningful remains can improve dissemination of cultural legacy to remote visitors and transfer knowledge to town planners. This paper presents the preliminary research, which is supposed to be integrated by some more detailed surveys in the near future, in order to populate a shared web repository in which scholars, tourists and planners will find useful information on the archaeological park.