Lebanon

The Levant under great empires — crossroads of civilisations

Lebanon's territory (c. 3000 BCE – 636 CE) was successively ruled by or contested between the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines — each leaving layers of culture, language, and religion that made the Lebanese Levant uniquely cosmopolitan and theologically diverse long before the modern sectarian divisions that define it today.

Phoenicia — inventors of the alphabet

Phoenicia (c. 1100–330 BCE) was the maritime trading civilisation of the Lebanese coast — the Phoenician city-states of Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, and Beirut created the world's first widely adopted alphabetic writing system, which gave rise to Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, and ultimately all Western writing, arguably the single most consequential cultural innovation in human history.

The Lebanese National Pact and independence

Lebanon's independence from French mandate (1943 CE) was formalised through the National Pact — an unwritten power-sharing agreement between the Maronite Christian and Sunni Muslim communities that allocated the presidency to a Maronite, the prime ministership to a Sunni, and parliamentary seats proportionally, creating a confessional system that has both preserved and paralysed Lebanon.

The Lebanese Civil War — fifteen years of faction warfare

The Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990 CE) was one of the most complex conflicts in modern history — involving Lebanese Christians, Muslims, Druze, Palestinians, Syrians, Israelis, and Americans in 15 years of shifting alliances, atrocities, and foreign interventions that killed approximately 150,000 people and displaced one million.

Beirut's reconstruction and the Hariri assassination

The assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri (14 February 2005 CE) in a massive car bomb explosion on the Beirut seafront killed 22 people, triggered the Cedar Revolution that forced Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon, and led to a Special Tribunal whose investigation implicated Hezbollah and indirectly Iran in one of the Middle East's most consequential political murders.

The Beirut explosion — the city shattered

The Beirut port explosion (4 August 2020 CE) was one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history — 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate, negligently stored for six years in Port Warehouse 12, detonated with the force of a small nuclear weapon, killing 218 people, injuring 7,000, destroying the port and half the city, and exposing the catastrophic incompetence and corruption of the Lebanese state.