Lebanon historical timeline

Origins

The Phoenician cities of Byblos, Tyre and Sidon were trading across the Mediterranean from around 3000 BC, and they exported something more durable than cedar or purple dye: the alphabet. The Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic scripts all descend from the letters Phoenician merchants carried with their cargo. The cedar forests of the mountains supplied Egypt and, by tradition, Solomon’s temple. Rome built at Baalbek on a scale it rarely attempted anywhere, and the mountains later sheltered Maronite Christians and then Druze, which is where the country’s religious geography begins.

Turning points

Mount Lebanon held a degree of autonomy under the Ottomans, and after sectarian violence in 1860 European intervention formalised it. France created Greater Lebanon in 1920 with borders that made no group a majority, and independence in 1943 came with an unwritten National Pact allocating the presidency, the premiership and the speakership to different sects — an arrangement that held the country together and has also been blamed for everything since. The 1950s and 1960s were prosperous enough that Beirut was called the Paris of the Middle East. Civil war from 1975 to 1990 killed perhaps 150,000 people and drew in Israel, Syria and others. Syrian forces left in 2005 after the assassination of Rafic Hariri. Then in 2019 the financial system collapsed — among the worst peacetime collapses anywhere in modern record — and in August 2020 an ammonium nitrate store detonated in Beirut’s port, destroying much of the city centre.

Influential people

Fakhr al-Din II, the seventeenth-century emir who first governed something resembling this territory. Khalil Gibran, whose The Prophet has sold in the tens of millions and never gone out of print. Rafic Hariri, who rebuilt central Beirut and was killed in 2005. And Fairuz, whose recordings have been played in Arab households every morning for sixty years.

Cultural evolution

Eighteen religious sects are officially recognised, and the state is built around them. Arabic is the language, and a Beiruti sentence may contain French and English in it without anyone noticing. The diaspora is several times larger than the resident population — Brazil alone has more people of Lebanese descent than Lebanon has citizens — and remittances from it have repeatedly kept the country solvent. And the mezze table, with its dozens of small dishes, has become a restaurant category in every city on earth.

Present-day significance

The currency has lost the great majority of its value, the state supplies electricity for a few hours a day, and political appointments have repeatedly stalled. Lebanon also hosts more refugees per head of population than any other country. The investigation into the port explosion has still not produced a public accounting, which is, for many Lebanese, the clearest statement of where things stand.