A green campus falling down a hillside to the sea, with the third oldest museum in the Middle East on it.
Founded in 1866 as the Syrian Protestant College by American Presbyterian missionaries, and renamed in 1920, the American University of Beirut has been the most influential university in the Arab world for a century and a half.
Its graduates include a very large share of the region’s doctors, engineers, journalists and politicians, and nineteen of its alumni were among the signatories or delegates at the founding of the United Nations in 1945.
The campus
Sixty-one acres on a hillside above the sea in Hamra, falling in terraces from Bliss Street down to the Corniche.
It is one of the most beautiful university campuses anywhere: mature trees, sandstone buildings from the 1870s onwards, gardens, and a view of the Mediterranean from nearly everywhere.
College Hall, the 1873 clock-tower building at the top, was destroyed by a car bomb in 1991 and rebuilt.
Marquand House, the president’s residence of 1879. Assembly Hall and its Gothic-revival chapel. The Green Field, the Charles Hostler Center on the seafront by Vincent James Associates, and the AUB beach.
The campus is also, quietly, a botanical collection — hundreds of species planted since the 1860s, many labelled.
The Archaeological Museum
Founded in 1868, and the third oldest museum in the Middle East after Cairo and Istanbul.
It is small, free, and very good. Around 20,000 objects from Lebanon and the region — Phoenician pottery and glass, Bronze Age material, coins, and an excellent collection of Lebanese and Mesopotamian seals.
Its particular strength is the prehistoric and Bronze Age material from Lebanese sites excavated by AUB archaeologists, much of which is not represented elsewhere.
The displays are old-fashioned in the best way — dense cases, careful labels, and a scholarly rather than a theatrical arrangement.
The other museums on campus
The Natural History Museum, small, with regional fauna and geology.
The Ancient Near East collections and the university’s rare book library are accessible to researchers.
Practical
Access is controlled. The campus is not open to the public in the way a European university is. Bring photo ID to the main gate on Bliss Street, state that you are visiting the museum, and expect to be signed in.
This policy tightens and loosens with the security situation. Check the museum’s page or telephone before making the trip.
The museum is free and closed at weekends and over university holidays.
Around it
Bliss Street outside the gate is student Beirut: bookshops, cheap food, manousheh stands, and the long-standing café scene of Hamra.
The Corniche runs below the campus, and the walk from the AUB gate west to Raouché is one of the good ones.
More Museums
National Museum of Beirut
The collection survived fifteen years on the front line because the director sealed it in concrete.
Sursock Museum
A Venetian-Ottoman villa given to the city as a modern art museum, wrecked by the port blast and reopened in 2023.
MIM Mineral Museum
One of the finest private mineral collections in the world, in a university basement, and almost nobody knows it is there.