Berytus was a Roman colony with the greatest law school in the empire, and pieces of it are lying in the middle of downtown.
In 15 BC, Augustus made Beirut a Roman colony — Colonia Julia Augusta Felix Berytus — and settled two legions of veterans in it.
It became one of the most important cities of the Roman east, and for three centuries it was famous across the empire for one thing.
The law school
The Law School of Berytus was founded in about the third century AD and became the pre-eminent school of Roman law anywhere. Students came from across the eastern empire.
Its jurists — Papinian and Ulpian among them, both of whom taught or studied here — are quoted extensively in the Digest of Justinian, the sixth-century compilation that is the foundation of the entire Western civil law tradition.
Meaning, without much exaggeration, that a substantial part of the legal system of continental Europe and Latin America was worked out on this hill.
What happened to it
On 9 July 551, an earthquake and the tsunami that followed destroyed Berytus. The death toll is put in the tens of thousands.
The law school was moved to Sidon and never recovered. The city was rebuilt on a much smaller scale and did not matter again for a thousand years.
What survives
The Roman Baths — a terraced excavation of a bath complex, with hypocaust pilae, apses and mosaics, laid out as a public garden below the Grand Serail. It is free, open and unfenced.
The Cardo Maximus — a stretch of the colonnaded main street, with re-erected granite columns, in the open near the cathedrals.
The Decumanus and various excavated foundations across downtown, most of them exposed during the Solidere reconstruction of the 1990s.
The Roman Hippodrome at Wadi Abou Jmil, partially excavated, and a subject of ongoing dispute between developers and archaeologists.
The honest bit
This is not Baalbek and it is not Jerash. What you get is a scatter of column stumps, foundations and a bath terrace, in an urban park, with almost no explanatory signage.
It is worth forty-five minutes because it is free, because it is beautiful in the evening when the columns are lit, and because knowing that this hill produced the textbooks of Roman law changes how the city reads.
The archaeology of downtown Beirut is itself a story. The postwar reconstruction uncovered an enormous amount — Canaanite, Persian, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Crusader, Ottoman — and the speed at which the site was cleared for building is one of the central criticisms of the Solidere project. Some of what was found is in the National Museum; a great deal of it went under the new foundations.
For the real thing
Baalbek, in the Bekaa Valley, has the largest Roman temple complex ever built and stones weighing 800 tonnes. That is the Roman site to give a day to.
Byblos has 7,000 years of continuous occupation in one tell.
Tyre and Anjar are both UNESCO sites and both further out.
More Landmarks
Raouché and the Corniche
Two limestone stacks in the sea and five kilometres of seafront promenade — the one place the whole city shares.
Mohammad al-Amin Mosque
A blue-domed mosque of 2008 standing beside a Maronite cathedral, with the grave of the man who built it outside.
Martyrs' Square and Downtown
A statue full of bullet holes, and a rebuilt city centre that a great many Beirutis have never forgiven.