Beirut

• 1. Introduction

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  Beirut sits on a peninsula jutting westward into the Mediterranean Sea, and the name of the city has been spoken aloud for longer than most civilisations have existed. The earliest written record of it appears in three Akkadian cuneiform tablets from the 14th century BC, the Amarna letters, in which a king named Ammunira of Biruta wrote to the pharaoh of Egypt. The name itself, rooted in the Phoenician word for "wells", pointed to what mattered most in that dry landscape: water within reach of the surface.

  For more than five thousand years, people have settled on this triangle of land between two hills and made it one of the most layered cities on earth. Phoenicians built a harbour here. Romans declared it their most Latin outpost in the eastern empire. A law school in Berytus produced jurists whose texts Justinian would later codify for the entire empire. And in the modern era, Beirut became simultaneously the banking capital of the Arab world, the so-called Paris of the Middle East, and a city shattered by civil war, invasion, and one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in recorded history.

  How a single city accumulated so many lives within one set of city limits, and how it has kept rebuilding itself after each catastrophe, is the story this documentary tells. The clues start underground, in the deep layers archaeologists have been cutting through since 1993.

• 2. Five Thousand Years Underground

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  Louis Lartet discovered the first prehistoric site within the urban area of Beirut in 1894, on a beach near the Orient and Bassoul hotels on the Avenue des Français. The flint tools recovered there were classified as Mousterian, and the collection is now held by the Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon. That single find would eventually be catalogued as Beirut I, the first of at least seven documented prehistoric sites within or adjacent to the modern city.

  Beirut IV, on the left bank of the Beirut River, was found by Jesuit Father Dillenseger and later published by fellow Jesuits. The site yielded around fifty varied bifaces from the Acheulean period, some with a lustrous sheen, and a rare Emireh point discovered by Henri Fleisch. Those objects are now held at the Museum of Lebanese Prehistory. The site no longer exists; buildings cover it entirely.

  The Phoenician port of the ancient city was located between Rue Foch and Rue Allenby on the north coast. It too has been buried, this time under the modern city rather than the earth. A controversy erupted on the 26th of June 2012 when Lebanon's Minister of Culture authorised a private company to destroy archaeological site BEY194 for a construction project worth $500 million. An international committee later disputed the site's identification as a port; its exact function may never be known.

  Then in 140 BC the Phoenician city was wiped out entirely when Diodotus Tryphon destroyed it during a dynastic conflict over the Seleucid throne, and a new Hellenistic city called Laodicea in Phoenicia was built over the ruins. The salvage excavations that began after 1993 have revealed the layout of that Hellenistic layer, including colonnaded streets, bath complexes, a circus, and a theatre.

• 3. Rome's Most Latin City

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  Pompey conquered the city in 64 BC, restored the name Berytus, and set the Roman transformation in motion. By 14 BC, during the reign of Herod the Great, Berytus had been elevated to a colony with full Italian rights, meaning its citizens were exempt from imperial taxation. Emperor Augustus settled veterans of two legions there: the 5th Macedonian and the 3rd Gallic. Beirut became, in the judgement of the ancient world, the most Roman city in the eastern provinces of the empire.

  The institution that made Berytus famous across the Roman world was its law school. Two of Rome's most celebrated jurists, Papinian and Ulpian, were natives of Phoenicia and taught there during the reign of the Severan emperors. Their influence outlasted the school itself: when Justinian assembled his Pandects in the 6th century, a large portion of the corpus of laws was drawn from those two men's work. In AD 533 Justinian formally recognised the Beirut school as one of only three official law schools in the entire empire.

  The school's end came suddenly. In 551 an earthquake struck the city and killed an estimated 30,000 people in Berytus alone. The students of the law school were transferred to Sidon.

  A small detail from this period speaks to how widely the city's imagery travelled. Mid-1st-century coins from Berytus bore the image of Tyche, goddess of fortune, and on their reverse a dolphin entwined around an anchor. That same symbol was later adopted by the early Venetian printer Aldus Manutius in the 15th century as his printer's mark.

• 4. The Ottoman City and Its Ambitions

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  Beirut spent centuries as a contested prize. Muslims conquered it in 635. From 1110 to 1291 it was part of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Saladin took it in 1187; Henry I of Brabant recaptured it in 1197 as part of the German Crusade. John of Ibelin, the Old Lord of Beirut, was granted the lordship in 1204 and rebuilt the city after the Ayyubids had destroyed it. The Mamluks expelled the Crusaders in 1291.

  Under Ottoman rule, which began when Sultan Selim I conquered Syria including present-day Lebanon between 1512 and 1520, Beirut was controlled by local Druze emirs. One of them, Fakhr-al-Din II, fortified the city early in the 17th century, but the Ottomans reclaimed it in 1763. The city then declined to a town of roughly 10,000 people, buffeted between Ottoman power, the Druze, and the Mamluks. Revival came only after Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt captured Acre in 1832.

  By the second half of the 19th century, European appetite for Lebanese silk had reshaped Beirut entirely. Families like the Sursocks built trade empires. French engineers completed a modern harbour in 1894 and a rail link to Damascus and Aleppo in 1907, and much of the trade flowed by French ship to Marseille. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica recorded the city's population as 36,000 Muslims, 77,000 Christians, 2,500 Jews, 400 Druze, and 4,100 foreigners.

  In 1888, Beirut became the capital of a vilayet covering sanjaks from Latakia to the Bekaa. Among the city's most prominent figures at the turn of the 20th century was Salim Ali Salam, who served simultaneously as deputy to the Ottoman parliament and President of the Municipality of Beirut. The first municipality in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire had been established in Beirut after petitions by the local bourgeoisie to Syria Vilayet governor Mehmed Rashid Pasha.

• 5. Prosperity, Civil War, and the Green Line

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  Lebanon achieved independence in 1943, and Beirut became the capital of a new republic. The city that emerged over the following decades earned the nickname "Paris of the Middle East": a banking haven, a major tourist destination, and a regional intellectual and cultural centre. Beirut International Airport opened on the 23rd of April 1954. At the onset of the oil boom in the 1960s, banks based in Beirut were the primary recipients of the region's petrodollars.

  Then in 1975 the Lebanese Civil War broke out, and the downtown district that had been the commercial heart of the city became a no man's land. The dividing line, known as the Green Line, separated a Muslim west from a Christian east. About 60,000 people died in the first two years of fighting alone, between 1975 and 1976. A particularly destructive episode was the 1978 Syrian siege of Achrafiyeh, the main Christian district, during which Syrian forces shelled the eastern quarter for three months in what became known as the Hundred Days' War.

  In 1982, most of West Beirut was under siege by Israeli troops. The following year, in 1983, bombers struck French and American barracks, killing 241 American servicemen, 58 French servicemen, six civilians, and the two suicide bombers. Between 1989 and 1990, fighting between Lebanese army factions and the Syrian-backed forces of Elias Hrawi caused further destruction in East Beirut.

  The war ended in 1990. Reconstruction of the downtown district was driven largely by Solidere, a development company established in 1994 by Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, who held a majority stake in the company. Critics noted that expropriations were made at undervalued rates, and that Solidere effectively acts as a de facto municipality over the privatised quarter. An American University of Beirut professor, Nabil Beyhum, wrote in 1992 that demolished buildings included "the last Ottoman and medieval remains in Beirut".

• 6. Violence Returns, Then the Port Explosion

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  Rafic Hariri was assassinated on the 5th of February 2005 near the Saint George Hotel. A month later, roughly one million people gathered in Beirut for an opposition rally that became known as the Cedar Revolution, the largest such gathering in Lebanon's history at that time. The last Syrian troops withdrew from Beirut on the 26th of April 2005.

  During the 2006 Lebanon War, Israeli bombardment damaged large parts of the city, especially the predominantly Shiite southern suburbs. The sequence began on the 12th of July 2006 when Hezbollah carried out an operation it called "Truthful Promise", which ended with eight Israeli deaths and six injuries. Israel implemented a naval and air blockade from the 13th of July, bombing the runways at Beirut International Airport and the Beirut-Damascus highway.

  On the 4th of August 2020, a massive explosion at the Port of Beirut killed at least 203 people and wounded more than 6,500. The cause was believed to be government-confiscated ammonium nitrate that had been stored at the port. Foreigners from at least 22 countries were among the casualties, with at least 108 Bangladeshis injured, making them the most affected foreign community. As many as 300,000 people were left homeless. On the 10th of August 2020, Prime Minister Hassan Diab announced his resignation after protests over alleged government negligence.

  Gemmayzeh, the artistic bohemian quarter east of the Central District that Travel + Leisure had called "SoHo by the Sea", received the most severe structural damage from the blast, leaving its 1950s apartment buildings and narrow streets among the hardest-hit neighbourhoods.

• 7. A City That Keeps Reinventing Itself

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  As of 2025, Greater Beirut holds a population of 2.4 million, just under half of all Lebanon's people. The city is classified as a Beta-minus World City by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network, and its banking system held a balance sheet of $152 billion at the end of 2012, nearly 3.5 times Lebanon's gross domestic product at the time.

  Beirut's universities date back to the 19th century. The American University of Beirut was founded in 1866, and Université Saint-Joseph in 1875. Researchers at the American University found that trilingualism among Beirutis, across Lebanese Arabic, French, and English, is common regardless of neighbourhood or religious community.

  The city has accumulated international recognition across entirely different domains. In 2009, The New York Times ranked Beirut number one on its "44 Places to Go" list. In the same year, UNESCO proclaimed it World Book Capital. By 2012, the 2011 MasterCard Index had recorded visitor spending in the city at $6.5 billion, the second-highest in the Middle East and Africa. The city is home to fashion designers with international careers, including Elie Saab, Zuhair Murad, and Reem Acra, as well as a street art scene developed after the civil war by artists such as Yazan Halwani, known for producing some of the largest murals in the city's Gemmayzeh and Hamra districts.

  The National Museum of Beirut holds roughly 1,300 exhibits spanning prehistoric times to the medieval Mamluk period. And in October 2013, the private Mim Museum opened with a collection of some 2,000 minerals from more than 70 countries, including the fossil of a pterodactyl named Mimodactylus libanensis, a complete specimen found in Lebanon and described as one-of-a-kind in the Middle East.