even if Cross’ theory was adjusted to apply to names Baalat and Baal, it would remain impossible to prove. Worship Baalat Gebal was the principal deity in the local pantheon of Byblos, located on the Mediterranean coast in modern Lebanon. She has been described as “the most recurrent character in the history of the city”. She was associated with commerce. A temple dedicated to her was located in the center of the settlement. It remained in use without interruption from the third millennium BCE down to the Roman period. It was the largest sanctuary in Byblos. As it is unlikely that Baalat Gebal had more than one temple in the city, the "Obelisk Temple" also identified during excavations might have been instead dedicated to a male figure connected to her. A number of sheet metal figurines have been discovered as a part of the temple deposit in the temple of Baalat Gebal. Most are representations of men, either in conical hats or without, while a single one might be depiction of Anubis holding the was scepter. It is commonly assumed that they were produced locally, though it has also been proposed that they were imported from Egypt roughly between 2050 and 1800 BCE due to stylistic parallels with similar objects from Mentuhotep II’s tomb located at Deir el-Bahri. Baalat Gebal was venerated by the kings of Byblos, possibly as early as in the early Bronze Age, though no individual rulers are identified in sources from that period. Rib-Addi, who reigned during the period documented in the Amarna letters, ended most of the messages he sent to the pharaoh with a wish for Baalat Gebal to protect the latter. Similar formulas appear in his letters to other Egyptian officials. A total of twenty seven instances have been identified. This habit which finds no parallels in the rest of the correspondence belonging to this text corpus. While wishes for wellbeing of the recipient were common, no other local ruler invoked his own local deity to bless the pharaoh. Furthermore, in a single case Rib-Addi presented Baalat Gebal as one of the deities the pharaoh owed his position to, which similarly is not otherwise attested for rulers of Levantine polities. It is not known if he used similar formulas in letters addressed to people from outside Egypt, as no such texts survive. In most cases he only invokes Baalat Gebal, though in a