Tyre

Tyre is a Phoenician city on the coast of southern Lebanon, inhabited since the Bronze Age. Herodotus, who visited around 450 BC, wrote that the priests told him the city had been founded 2,300 years earlier. Between the 9th and 6th centuries BC it became a leading city-state and planted colonies around the Mediterranean, among them Carthage and Cádiz. Legend holds that purple dye was invented here.

Tyre fell under Babylonian rule in 572 BC. In 332 BC Alexander the Great built a causeway about 750 m long across the sea to take the island city. Sand piled up on both sides of it and joined the island to the mainland, and most of the modern town now stands on that isthmus. The city's role declined at the end of the Crusades, and most of its visible remains are Roman.

Large-scale excavation began in 1946 under Maurice Chéhab, uncovering the hippodrome at Al-Bass and the Roman baths of the City site. Tyre was inscribed in 1984 in an attempt to halt damage to its archaeological sites from armed conflict and unplanned building. Experts who visited after the 2006 war found no direct damage to the ancient city, though frescoes in a Roman funerary cave had been damaged. In 2024 UNESCO granted enhanced protection to 34 cultural sites in Lebanon, Tyre among them.