Timeline of Beirut

Biruta writes to Pharaoh. The Amarna letters — Egyptian diplomatic correspondence of the fourteenth century BC — include tablets from Ammunira, ruler of Biruta, to the Egyptian court. It is the first time the city is named in a surviving document, and there had already been settlement here for two thousand years.

A colony of veterans. Augustus makes Beirut a Roman colony — Colonia Julia Augusta Felix Berytus — and settles two legions of veterans in it. It becomes one of the principal cities of the Roman east.

The law school. The Law School of Berytus is flourishing by the third century and becomes the pre-eminent school of Roman law anywhere. Its jurists are quoted throughout Justinian’s Digest, which is the foundation of the civil law tradition of continental Europe and Latin America.

The earthquake. On 9 July an earthquake and the tsunami that followed destroy Berytus, killing tens of thousands. The law school moves to Sidon and never recovers. The city is rebuilt small and does not matter again for a thousand years.

The Crusaders take Beirut. Baldwin I captures the city after a siege, and it becomes a lordship of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. It changes hands repeatedly over the next two centuries and is finally taken by the Mamluks in 1291.

Four centuries under Istanbul. The Ottomans take the Levant after Marj Dabiq. Beirut spends the next three hundred years as a minor port of a few thousand people, overshadowed by Sidon, Tripoli and Acre.

Silk changes everything. European — chiefly French — demand for Lebanese silk turns Beirut into the export point for the mulberry groves of Mount Lebanon. The port is rebuilt and the population begins to climb from around ten thousand.

Massacre in the mountain. Sectarian conflict in Mount Lebanon and Damascus kills thousands, most of them Maronite Christians. European intervention follows, and an autonomous Mount Lebanon district is created under Ottoman rule with international guarantee — the first ancestor of the modern state.

The road to Damascus. A French company opens the carriage road over the mountains to Damascus, and the railway follows in 1895. Beirut becomes the port for the Syrian interior, which is what it has substantially remained.

A university. American Presbyterian missionaries found the Syrian Protestant College, which becomes the American University of Beirut. The Jesuit Université Saint-Joseph follows in 1875. Between them they educate the intellectual class of the modern Arab world.

Capital of a province. Beirut is made the capital of its own Ottoman vilayet, running the coast from Latakia to Nablus. Its population passes a hundred thousand, and the modern city — the port, the tram, the gas lighting, the newspapers — takes shape.

The hangings, and the famine. On 6 May the Ottoman authorities hang Lebanese and Syrian nationalists in the square that now bears their name — Martyrs’ Square. The wartime blockade and locust plague bring a famine to Mount Lebanon that kills perhaps a third of its people.

Greater Lebanon. France takes the mandate and proclaims Greater Lebanon, adding the Bekaa, the south and Tripoli to the autonomous Mount Lebanon district. The demographic balance changes decisively, and the sectarian question is built into the state at its foundation.

The census that was never repeated. A population count establishes the confessional proportions on which political office is still allocated. No census has been taken since, because nobody wants the answer.

Independence, and the National Pact. Lebanon becomes independent. An unwritten agreement distributes office by sect: a Maronite president, a Sunni prime minister, a Shia speaker. It is designed to hold a plural society together and it also institutionalises the divisions it manages.

The refugees arrive. Around 100,000 Palestinians displaced by the founding of Israel reach Lebanon and are settled in camps intended as temporary. Their descendants are still there, still without citizenship and still barred from most professions.

The first crisis. A short civil conflict over the presidency and Lebanon’s regional alignment ends with American marines landing on the beach at Beirut and a negotiated settlement. It is a rehearsal that almost nobody read as one.

The bank collapses. Intra Bank, the largest in Lebanon, fails, shaking the banking sector that the golden-age economy was built on. The city recovers, but the confidence does not fully return.

The airport raid. Israeli commandos destroy thirteen Lebanese civilian aircraft at Beirut airport in reprisal for a PLO attack. The Palestinian armed presence in Lebanon becomes the central political question, and in 1969 the Cairo Agreement formally permits it.

The war begins. On 13 April an ambush of a bus in Ain el-Rummaneh starts fifteen years of civil war. The Green Line forms through downtown within months, dividing the city until 1990.

Syria enters. Syrian troops deploy in Lebanon, initially with Arab League cover. They remain for twenty-nine years.

The siege, and Sabra and Shatila. Israel invades and besieges West Beirut through the summer; the PLO leadership is evacuated. In September the president-elect is assassinated and, in the days after, militiamen massacre civilians in the Sabra and Shatila camps while the area is under Israeli military control. An Israeli commission of inquiry later finds the defence minister personally responsible for failing to prevent it.

The barracks bombings. The US embassy is bombed in April; in October simultaneous truck bombs kill 241 American and 58 French servicemen of the multinational force. The force withdraws within months.

Taif. An agreement negotiated in Saudi Arabia rebalances power between the presidency and the cabinet and provides for the disarmament of the militias. It ends the war and leaves the confessional system in place.

The amnesty. A general amnesty pardons almost all crimes committed during the war. Militia leaders enter government. There is no truth commission, no accounting, and no history curriculum. Around 17,000 people remain missing.

Solidere. A private company is established to rebuild the destroyed city centre, with powers to expropriate owners and compensate them in shares. Around 80 per cent of the historic downtown is demolished. The result is handsome and, most Beirutis will tell you, not theirs.

Hariri. On 14 February a truck bomb on the Corniche kills the former prime minister Rafic Hariri and twenty-one others. A million people fill the streets, and Syrian troops leave Lebanon after twenty-nine years.

Thirty-four days. A war between Israel and Hezbollah destroys much of the southern suburbs and the country’s infrastructure, and kills over a thousand people in Lebanon. Reconstruction is largely privately and externally funded.

A million refugees. The Syrian war sends over a million refugees into a country of four million — the highest per-capita refugee burden in the world, on top of the Palestinian population already here.

The collapse, and the streets. The currency and the banking system fail. The lira loses around 98 per cent of its value and depositors are locked out of their savings; the World Bank ranks it among the three most severe economic collapses anywhere since the mid-nineteenth century. In October hundreds of thousands of people from every sect fill the streets demanding the removal of the entire political class. Nothing changes.

4 August. At 18:07, 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored in a port hangar for six years — despite at least ten documented written warnings — detonate. At least 218 people are killed, around 7,000 injured and 300,000 made homeless. Nobody has been convicted. The full account is here.

Sursock reopens. The museum, wrecked by the blast, reopens after three years of restoration funded largely from abroad, with its stained glass reassembled from fragments. The repair of Gemmayzeh and Mar Mikhael was done almost entirely by volunteers and NGOs; the state contributed very little.