Berytus silted from river island to Beta world city
Beirut, Lebanon's capital, is home to about 2.4 million people in the greater city as of 2025, just under half the country. Its first settlement stood on an island in the Beirut River until the channel silted up, and people have lived on this Mediterranean peninsula for more than 5,000 years.
The name goes back to a Phoenician word for wells, a nod to the easily reached water table. It first appears in the 14th century BC in Amarna letters sent to Egypt by King Ammunira of Biruta. Flint tools found across the modern city span the Middle Palaeolithic to the Bronze Age, though many of the sites catalogued by early 20th-century Jesuit collectors now lie under buildings. Digs downtown have exposed Phoenician, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader and Ottoman layers stacked atop one another.
Diodotus Tryphon destroyed the Phoenician city in 140 BC during a Seleucid succession fight, and a Hellenistic town called Laodicea replaced it. Tigranes of Armenia held it briefly before Pompey took it in 64 BC and restored the old name. Made a colony in 14 BC, it was the only one in the region with full Italian rights, exempting citizens from imperial tax, and veterans of two legions settled there, making it the most Roman city of the eastern provinces. Its coins showed a dolphin wrapped around an anchor, an emblem later adopted by the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius.
The law school where Papinian and Ulpian taught was named one of the empire's three official schools by Justinian in 533, but an earthquake in 551 killed perhaps 30,000 people and sent the students to Sidon. Muslims took the city in 635; crusaders held it from 1110 until the Mamluks expelled them in 1291.
In modern times the civil war, the 2006 war and the 2020 port explosion each wrecked large areas, and each time the city was rebuilt.
Source: Beirut
