Berytus
Settlement here goes back at least five thousand years. The Amarna letters of the fourteenth century BC include correspondence from the ruler of Biruta.
In 15 BC Augustus made it a Roman colony. Its law school became the pre-eminent school of Roman law in the empire, and its jurists are quoted throughout Justinian’s Digest — the foundation of the civil law tradition of continental Europe and Latin America.
On 9 July 551 an earthquake and tsunami destroyed the city. The law school moved to Sidon and Beirut did not matter again for a thousand years.
Silk and missionaries
Ottoman from 1516, and a minor port until the 1830s, when European demand for Lebanese silk made it the export point for Mount Lebanon.
The American University was founded in 1866 and the Université Saint-Joseph in 1875. Between them they educated the intellectual class of the modern Arab world.
The population went from about 10,000 in 1830 to over 100,000 by 1900.
In 1916 the Ottomans hanged nationalists in the square that is now Martyrs’ Square.
Mandate and independence
France took the mandate in 1920 and created Greater Lebanon by adding the Bekaa, the south and Tripoli to the autonomous Mount Lebanon district — which changed the demographic balance and built the sectarian question into the state.
Independence came in 1943, with the National Pact distributing office by sect on the basis of a 1932 census that has never been repeated.
The golden age
From independence to 1975, Beirut was the banking, publishing and press centre of the Arab world, and Hamra was its intellectual street.
It was also built on an unresolved settlement and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees after 1948 and 1970.
The war
1975 to 1990. A civil war on sectarian lines, with PLO, Syrian, Israeli and multinational intervention. The Green Line divided the city for fifteen years. Beirut was besieged in 1982.
Around 150,000 died and roughly 17,000 remain missing. A general amnesty in 1991 pardoned almost all wartime crimes. There is no agreed account of the war and it is not taught in schools.
Rebuild and collapse
Solidere rebuilt downtown in the 1990s by expropriation and demolition — see Martyrs’ Square and Downtown.
Rafic Hariri was assassinated on 14 February 2005; a million people came into the streets and Syrian troops left after 29 years.
2006 brought a 34-day war with Israel. 2011 brought over a million Syrian refugees.
In 2019 the currency and banking system collapsed — among the three most severe economic collapses anywhere since the mid-nineteenth century, by the World Bank’s assessment.
4 August 2020
2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate, stored in a port hangar for six years despite written warnings, detonated. At least 218 people died, 7,000 were injured and 300,000 were made homeless.
Nobody has been convicted. The full account is here.
The longer version is The City That Keeps Being Rebuilt, and the dated version is the timeline.