Beirut basics - part I : a short history

The promontory on which Beirut resides is essentially rocky, surrounded by fertile plains and pine forests which climb up towards nearby Mount Lebanon. It is surrounded by the sea to the north, south and west, with the mountains forming the eastern backstage. While traces of human life in Beirut have been found as far as prehistoric times, Beirut as a human agglomeration dates back to approximately 4000 BC. During Phoenician times, it was mostly a small fishermen and workers village, which lacked the importance and strength of its neighbors Byblos and Tripoli to the north, and Sidon and Tyre to the South. Beirut became Berytus under the Romans, who recognized the strategic importance of its geographical situation and built a city which boasted palaces, universities, as well as a famous Law library whose importance matched that of Alexandria. But Beirut was ravaged, like 7 times afterwards, by a huge earthquake which leveled it to the ground, and everything had to start back from scratch. Like the rest of country, it was visited by all kinds of civilisations, from Pharaonic Egyptians to Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Ottomans, etc.

Beirut was relatively unheard of during most of its history, although several times mentioned in travelers' notes for its beauty and charm, due to its gardens, constructions, welcoming people and geographical location. It was mostly a quiet trader's and fishermen's town nestled among its walls on the western and northern tips of the promontory, where travelers as well as diplomats often stopped to rest, where religious education of all kinds flourished peacefully thanks to its open governorate and central location. Its vast swathes of land attracted the inhabitants of the mountains for settlement and, like many of their countrymen, departure to foreign lands through its port. The port always played an important role in Beirut's commercial livelihood, because of its location on the northern part of the promontory, where deeper and calmer seas allowed ships of all sizes to shore up easily. Beirut was therefore relatively prosperous, albeit quieter than other cities of the Lebanese coast.

Beirut began to move towards the end of the 18th century when the Ottomans, due to a combination of geopolitical games, both local and international (the French and British, as well as the Americans, had started to use Beirut as a base for their religious, political and military expeditions throughout the whole Levant region), gave more and more attention to Beirut which gradually became a settling spot for diplomatic and religious representations of all kinds. The Grandes Puissances were attracted by the city's religious tolerance, its port, its strategic location which gained importance with the opening of a new mountain road to Damascus which made travel much easier and most of all, faster. With this came the traders, the foreign expatriates, as well as the indigenous populations of Mount Lebanon which were fleeing political instability and war to settle down in prospering Beirut. Moreover, local influential families were readily permeable to these cultural and political changes, which soon made their fortunes both politically and materially.

Towards the end of the 19th century, helped by the decline of nearby Saida which lost its position as the "port of Damascus", Beirut became the political, religious, cultural and trade center for the Levant region. After the Ottoman Empire's decline, the French mandate and the independence movements against it, Beirut, already a fully fledged metropolis (by local standards), was declared capital of the Republic of Lebanon, born on the 22nd of November, 1943.