Cedars of God

Common card · No. 371626

The Cedars of God (Arabic: أرز الربّ, romanized: Arz el-Rab, lit. 'Cedars of the Lord') is a forest in the Kadisha Valley of Bsharre, Lebanon. It is a vestige of the extensive forests of the Lebanon cedar that thrived across Mount Lebanon in antiquity. Early modern travelers' accounts of the wild cedars appear to refer to the ones in Bsharri; the Christian monks of the monasteries in the Kadisha Valley venerated the trees for centuries. The earliest documented references of the Cedars of God are found in Tablets 4–6 of the Epic of Gilgamesh. The Phoenicians, Israelites, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Romans, Arabs, and Turks used Lebanese timber. The Egyptians valued it for shipbuilding, and in the Ottoman Empire the timber was used to construct railways.

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