Beirut has been destroyed and rebuilt so many times that the count depends on what you are willing to call a destruction. Seven is the number people here use. It is not a boast.
Berytus
There has been a settlement on this promontory for at least five thousand years, with Canaanite occupation attested from the third millennium BC. The Amarna letters — Egyptian diplomatic correspondence of the fourteenth century BC — include letters from the ruler of Biruta.
The name probably derives from a Canaanite word for wells.
In 15 BC Augustus made it a Roman colony, Colonia Julia Augusta Felix Berytus, and settled veterans of two legions in it. It became one of the most important cities of the Roman east, chiefly because of its law school.
The Law School of Berytus was the pre-eminent school of Roman law in the empire. Its jurists are quoted throughout Justinian’s Digest, which is the foundation of the entire civil law tradition of continental Europe and Latin America.
On 9 July 551 an earthquake and tsunami destroyed the city and killed tens of thousands. The law school moved to Sidon and never recovered. Beirut did not matter again for a thousand years.
Ottoman Beirut
Under the Ottomans from 1516, Beirut was a minor port for three centuries.
What changed it was silk. From the 1830s, European — principally French — demand for Lebanese silk, and the growing of mulberry in Mount Lebanon, turned Beirut into the export point. The port was rebuilt, a carriage road to Damascus opened in 1863, and the railway followed.
Missionaries arrived alongside the trade. The Syrian Protestant College — later the American University of Beirut — was founded in 1866; the Jesuit Université Saint-Joseph in 1875. Between them they produced the intellectual class of the modern Arab world.
The city’s population went from around 10,000 in 1830 to over 100,000 by 1900.
The sectarian conflict of 1860 in Mount Lebanon, in which thousands of Maronite Christians were killed, brought European intervention and the creation of an autonomous Mount Lebanon district — the first version of the arrangement that eventually produced Lebanon.
The mandate
The Ottomans hanged nationalists in Martyrs’ Square in 1916. The First World War brought famine to Mount Lebanon that killed perhaps a third of the population.
France took the mandate in 1920 and created Greater Lebanon, adding the Bekaa, the south and Tripoli to the Mount Lebanon district — which changed the demographic balance decisively and built the sectarian problem into the state at its foundation.
The National Pact of 1943, at independence, distributed offices by sect on the basis of a 1932 census that has never been repeated: a Maronite president, a Sunni prime minister, a Shia speaker.
That census has still never been repeated. Nobody wants the answer.
The golden age
From independence to 1975, Beirut was the banking centre, publishing centre, and freest press of the Arab world.
Money came from the Gulf, journalists and exiles came from everywhere, and Hamra was the most intellectually alive street in the region. The architecture of the period — The Egg, the towers, the cinemas — was ambitious modernism.
It was also built on an unresolved settlement, an economy that excluded most of the country, and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees after 1948 and again after 1970, in camps with no rights and no prospect of return.
The war
1975 to 1990. It is not summarisable in a paragraph and every summary is contested.
Roughly: a civil war between Lebanese factions organised on sectarian lines, into which the PLO, Syria, Israel and a multinational force all intervened at different points. The Green Line divided the city for fifteen years. Beirut was besieged in 1982; the massacres at Sabra and Shatila followed. The US embassy and the Marine barracks were bombed in 1983.
Around 150,000 people died. Roughly 17,000 remain missing.
The Taif Agreement ended it in 1989–90. A general amnesty in 1991 pardoned almost all wartime crimes, and many militia leaders entered politics, where a number of them or their heirs remain.
There is no agreed account of the war, it is not taught in schools, and there has been no truth commission. Beit Beirut is the closest thing to a public reckoning and it is usually shut.
The rebuild, and the collapse
Solidere rebuilt the centre in the 1990s by expropriating property owners and demolishing most of what survived — see Martyrs’ Square and Downtown.
Rafic Hariri, who drove it and was prime minister, was assassinated on 14 February 2005. A million people came into the streets; Syrian troops left after 29 years.
2006 brought a 34-day war with Israel. 2011 brought over a million Syrian refugees into a country of four million — the highest per-capita refugee burden in the world.
In 2019 the currency and the banking system collapsed. The World Bank ranked it among the three most severe economic collapses anywhere since the mid-nineteenth century. Savings were wiped out. In October, hundreds of thousands of people from every sect filled the streets demanding the removal of the entire political class. Nothing changed.
4 August 2020
2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate, stored in a port hangar for six years despite repeated written warnings, detonated at 18:07.
At least 218 people died. Around 7,000 were injured and 300,000 were made homeless in an instant.
Nobody has been convicted. The investigation has been obstructed continuously and the families are still campaigning. The full account is here.
What it means for a visitor
That the city you are walking through is not a set of ruins with a story attached. It is a place where the last chapter has not finished, where a great many people you meet lost their savings in 2019 and their windows in 2020, and where the state has been substantially absent from both.
It is also a place where the restaurants are full, the galleries are open, and people will insist on feeding you.
Both are true. Holding both at once is what visiting Beirut requires.