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Beirut....
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Originally named Bêrūt "The Wells" by the
Phoenicians, the first historical reference to Beirut dates from the
15th century BCE, when it is mentioned in a cuneiform tablet that is one
of the "Amarna letters." The most ancient settlement was on an island in
the river that progressively silted up. The city was known in antiquity as Berytus; this name was taken in 1934 for the archaeological journal
published by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the American University
of Beirut.
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In 140 BCE, the city was taken and destroyed by Diodotus Tryphon in his
contest with Antiochus VII Sidetes for the throne of the
Seleucid monarchy.
Beirut was soon rebuilt on a more regularized Hellenistic plan, renamed Laodicea in
Canaan, in honor of a Seleucid queen. The modern city overlies
the ancient one and little archaeology had been accomplished until after the
end of the civil war in 1991; now large sites in the devastated city center
have been opened to archaeological exploration. A dig in 1994 established
that one of Beirut's modern streets, Souk Tawile, still follows the lines of
an ancient Hellenistic/Roman one. |
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Under the Romans it was enriched by the dynasty of
Herod
the Great, then made a colonia in the late 1st century CE. Beirut's school
of law was widely known at the time. Two of Rome's most famous jurists, Papinian and Ulpian, both natives of
Phoenicia, taught at the law school
under the Severan emperors. When Justinian assembled his Pandects in the 6th
century, a large part of the corpus of laws were derived from these two
jurists, and Justinian recognized the school as one of the three official
law schools of the empire (533 CE). Within a few years, as the result of a
disastrous earthquake (551), the students were transferred to
Sidon.
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Beirut passed to the Arabs in 635. As a trading centre
of the eastern Mediterranean Beirut was overshadowed by
Akko during the
Middle Ages. From 1110 to 1291 it was in the hands of
Crusader lords. No
matter who was its nominal overlord, whether Turk or
Mamluk, Beirut was
ruled locally by Druze emirs. One of these, Fakr ed-Din Maan II, fortified
it early in the 17th century, but the Ottomans retook it in 1763 and
thenceforth, with the help of Damascus, Beirut successfully broke Akko's
monopoly on Syrian maritime trade and for a few years supplanted it as the
main trading centre in the region. During the succeeding epoch of
rebellion against Ottoman hegemony at Akko under Jezzar and Abdullah
pashas, Beirut declined to a small town (population about 10,000), fought
over among the Druze, the Turks and the pashas. |
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