The history of Lebanon

Lebanon is a narrow, mountainous country on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, between the sea, the Mount Lebanon range and the Beqaa Valley. Its coastal cities of Byblos, Sidon and Tyre were among the oldest towns of the ancient world and the homes of the Phoenicians, the seafaring traders who spread the alphabet across the Mediterranean. Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arab caliphs, Crusaders, Mamluks and Ottomans ruled the coast in turn, while the mountains became a refuge for religious communities such as the Maronite Christians, the Druze and the Shia. Modern Lebanon was created under French mandate in 1920 and became independent in 1943 with a political system that shares power among its religious communities. Its history since has alternated between prosperity and crisis, including a civil war from 1975 to 1990, repeated wars with Israel, and since 2019 a financial collapse and renewed conflict.

People have lived in Lebanon since the Old Stone Age, and the rock shelter of Ksar Akil near Beirut holds one of the longest sequences of Palaeolithic remains in the Near East. At the end of the Ice Age the Natufian foragers settled in villages, and by about 5000 BCE fishermen and farmers had built huts with lime-plaster floors at Byblos. In the Bronze Age the Canaanite towns of the coast traded cedar, the most famous product of the Lebanon mountains, with Egypt; from the time of the Old Kingdom Byblos, called Gubla, shipped timber, oil and wine to the pharaohs in exchange for gold and papyrus, and its temples were filled with Egyptian offerings.

In the 15th century BCE the campaigns of Thutmose III brought the coast under the New Kingdom of Egypt, and in the 14th century the Amarna letters preserve the appeals of Rib-Hadda, king of Byblos, to an Egyptian court that seemed deaf to his troubles. Egypt then contested the northern Levant with the Hittites, and Ramesses II left an inscription carved into the cliffs at Nahr al-Kalb, north of Beirut, where later conquerors added their own.

After the Late Bronze Age collapse of around 1200 BCE, the coastal cities emerged as independent kingdoms of the people the Greeks called the Phoenicians, after the costly purple dye they made from murex shells. The cities of Phoenicia developed an alphabet of 22 consonant letters, which the Greeks adopted and adapted, and their merchants traded in timber, glass, textiles, ivory and metalwork. Tyre led a great maritime expansion; according to the Hebrew Bible its king Hiram supplied cedar for Solomon's temple in Jerusalem, and its settlers founded colonies across the Mediterranean, including Gadir (Cádiz) in Spain and, by tradition in 814 BCE, Carthage.

From the ninth century the cities paid tribute to Assyria, and those that resisted were punished; Esarhaddon destroyed Sidon in 677 BCE. Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylonia besieged Tyre for thirteen years, and in 539 BCE the Phoenician cities passed peacefully to Cyrus the Great and the Achaemenid Empire, whose navy they largely supplied. Sidon rebelled against Persia in the 340s and was burned. In 332 BCE Alexander the Great took Tyre, then an island city, after building a causeway across the sea in a seven-month siege, and sold many of its people into slavery.

Alexander's successors fought over the coast: the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt held it for a century until the Seleucid Empire won it at the Battle of Panium in 200 BCE. Greek became the language of the cities, though Phoenician survived for centuries. In 64 BCE Pompey annexed Syria for the Roman Republic, and under the Roman Empire the coast prospered. Berytus, today's Beirut, became a Roman colony with a renowned school of law, and at Heliopolis, now Baalbek, the Romans built one of the largest temple complexes in their empire, dedicated to Jupiter, Bacchus and Venus.

Christianity spread early along the coast, and the Gospels place Jesus in the region of Tyre and Sidon. In the late fourth and early fifth centuries the followers of a hermit named Maron founded the monastic movement from which the Maronite Church descends; Maronite communities later moved into the mountains of northern Lebanon, which became their heartland. Under the Byzantine Empire the coast suffered from earthquakes, above all the disaster of 551 under Justinian I, which destroyed Berytus and its law school, and from wars with Persia; the Sasanian Empire occupied the region from 619 to 629.

Arab armies of the Rashidun Caliphate took the coastal cities in the 630s. Under Mu'awiya, governor of Syria and founder of the Umayyad Caliphate, ruling from Damascus, Arab tribes were settled on the coast and a fleet was built in its ports. The mountains remained largely Christian, and Christian highlanders known as the Mardaites harassed the caliphate with Byzantine support in the seventh century. Under the Abbasid Caliphate the coast declined, but trade revived after the Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt took the Levant in the 970s, and Tripoli and Tyre flourished as ports exporting sugar, glass and textiles.

Over these centuries the Lebanese mountains became a refuge for religious minorities. The Druze faith emerged from Ismaili Shia Islam in the early 11th century and took root in the southern part of Mount Lebanon, where Druze lords held the land, while Twelver Shia communities lived in Jabal Amil in the south and in the Beqaa. Arabic gradually replaced Syriac and Greek as the language of everyday life, and most of the coast became Muslim.

During the Crusades, the armies of the First Crusade marched down the coast in 1099, and over the next quarter-century the Crusaders took Beirut and Sidon in 1110 and Tyre in 1124, which became part of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, while Tripoli, taken in 1109 after a long siege, became the capital of the County of Tripoli. The Maronites, who often sided with the Franks, entered into union with the Church of Rome in this period, forming a tie with Catholic Europe that would last for centuries. Saladin took Beirut and Sidon in 1187, though the Crusaders later regained parts of the coast.

The Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt ended Crusader rule: Qalawun took Tripoli in 1289, and the fall of Acre in 1291 was followed by the surrender of Tyre, Sidon and Beirut. The Mamluks rebuilt Tripoli as a new city inland, whose mosques and madrasas survive, and in 1305 they launched punitive campaigns against Shia and other communities in Kesrouan, settling Turkmen tribes on the coast.

The Ottoman sultan Selim I conquered the Levant from the Mamluks in 1516, and the Ottoman Empire governed Lebanon through local lords who collected taxes in return for autonomy. The Druze Ma'n family of the Chouf rose to dominate Mount Lebanon, and Fakhr al-Din II (about 1572–1635) built a principality stretching from the Galilee to Palmyra. He allied with the Grand Duke of Tuscany, spent five years in exile in Italy, brought Italian engineers home, and welcomed Maronite peasants to the Druze districts, but the Ottomans finally defeated him and he was executed in Istanbul in 1635.

In 1697 the emirate passed to the Shihab family, who later became Maronite Christians. The most powerful of them, Bashir II (ruled, with interruptions, 1789–1840), stayed neutral when Napoleon besieged Acre in 1799, and later sided with Muhammad Ali of Egypt, whose son Ibrahim Pasha occupied Syria in 1831–40. When a British, Austrian and Ottoman intervention drove out the Egyptians in 1840, Bashir went into exile. The old order collapsed in strife between Maronites and Druze, which the European powers encouraged by backing rival communities: in 1842 Mount Lebanon was divided into a Christian and a Druze district, a peasant revolt against the landlords broke out in Kesrouan in 1858, and in 1860 a civil war ended with the massacre of several thousand Christians by Druze fighters in the mountains, followed by a massacre of Christians in Damascus.

France landed troops, and in 1861 an international settlement created the Mutasarrifate of Mount Lebanon, an autonomous province under a non-Lebanese Christian governor appointed by the sultan and a council representing the communities. Mount Lebanon became peaceful and prosperous on the silk trade, Beirut grew into a major port, and missionary schools, among them the Syrian Protestant College of 1866, later the American University of Beirut, made the city a centre of the Arabic literary revival. Many Lebanese emigrated to the Americas, Africa and Australia, beginning a diaspora that today outnumbers the population at home.

During World War I the Ottomans ended the autonomy of Mount Lebanon. An Allied blockade, Ottoman requisitions, locusts and hoarding caused a great famine in 1915–18, in which perhaps 100,000 or more people died in Beirut and Mount Lebanon. Under the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 Britain had assigned the coast to French influence, and after the war the Maronite patriarch Elias Hoayek pressed at the Paris peace conference for an enlarged Lebanon. On 1 September 1920 the French general Henri Gouraud proclaimed the state of Greater Lebanon, adding Beirut, Tripoli, Sidon, Tyre, the south and the Beqaa, with large Muslim populations, to Mount Lebanon, under a League of Nations mandate held by France.

A constitution of 1926 created the Lebanese Republic, with seats in parliament and government posts allotted by religious community. Many Sunni Muslims and Arab nationalists rejected separation from Syria, while most Maronites saw France as their protector. The census of 1932, which showed a slight Christian majority, is still the last official count of the population.

In 1941, during World War II, British and Free French forces took Lebanon from the Vichy regime, and Charles de Gaulle's representative promised independence. When the newly elected parliament abolished the mandate's powers in November 1943, the French arrested President Bechara el-Khoury and Prime Minister Riad al-Solh; protests and British pressure forced their release on 22 November, celebrated as Independence Day. The two leaders' unwritten National Pact reserved the presidency for a Maronite, the premiership for a Sunni and the speakership of parliament for a Shia, and committed Christians to forgo Western protection and Muslims to forgo union with Syria. French troops left in 1946.

About 100,000 Palestinians fled to Lebanon during the 1948 war that followed the creation of Israel, and they and their descendants still live largely in refugee camps with limited rights. In 1958 an uprising by supporters of Gamal Abdel Nasser's pan-Arabism against President Camille Chamoun brought a brief landing of US Marines, and the army commander Fouad Chehab became president, building a stronger state. Beirut prospered as the banking, publishing and tourist centre of the Arab world, but wealth was unevenly shared, and the growing Muslim, and especially Shia, population felt underrepresented. After the Palestinian guerrilla movements were expelled from Jordan in 1970–71, the Palestine Liberation Organization made Lebanon its main base for attacks on Israel, bringing Israeli reprisals and deepening Lebanese divisions.

Fighting broke out in Beirut in April 1975 between Christian militias, chiefly the Phalange, and a coalition of Palestinian groups and Lebanese leftist and Muslim parties. The war quickly fragmented the capital along a "green line" and brought massacres on all sides, among them Karantina and Damour in January 1976 and the siege of Tel al-Zaatar camp that summer. Syria sent troops in 1976 and remained for nearly three decades. Israel invaded the south in 1978 and set up a border zone held by an allied militia, and in June 1982 it invaded again, besieging West Beirut until the PLO leadership left by sea. After President-elect Bachir Gemayel was assassinated in September 1982, Phalangist militiamen killed hundreds and possibly thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians in the Sabra and Shatila camps, in an area under Israeli army control.

A multinational force of US, French and Italian troops withdrew in 1984 after suicide bombings in October 1983 killed 241 American and 58 French servicemen. In the same years Hezbollah, a Shia movement backed by Iran, emerged to fight the Israeli occupation, and Western hostages were kidnapped in Beirut. The war continued as a struggle among Druze, Shia, Christian and Palestinian forces and their foreign backers. In 1988 two rival governments formed, one under the army commander Michel Aoun. The Taif Agreement of 1989, negotiated in Saudi Arabia, shifted power from the Maronite presidency to the cabinet and gave Christians and Muslims equal shares of parliament, and the war ended in October 1990 when Syrian forces ousted Aoun. Some 150,000 people had been killed, and hundreds of thousands displaced.

After the war the militias were disarmed except for Hezbollah, which continued its campaign against Israel's occupation of the south, and Syria dominated Lebanese politics. Prime Minister Rafic Hariri led the rebuilding of central Beirut, financed with heavy borrowing. Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in May 2000. On 14 February 2005 Hariri was killed by a huge car bomb; mass protests, called the Cedar Revolution, and international pressure forced Syria to withdraw its troops by April,. In July 2006 Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers led to a 34-day war in which about 1,200 people were killed in Lebanon, most of them civilians, and around 160 Israelis. Political deadlock between blocs aligned with and against Syria and Hezbollah followed, and from 2011 more than a million refugees from the war in Syria arrived.

In October 2019 mass protests against the political class erupted as the banking system collapsed, the currency lost most of its value and savings were frozen, and on 4 August 2020 a huge store of ammonium nitrate exploded at the port of Beirut, killing more than 200 people and devastating much of the city. After Hezbollah began firing on Israel in October 2023, saying it acted in solidarity with the Palestinians in the Gaza war, the conflict escalated in September 2024, when Israel detonated thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah members, launched heavy air strikes, killed its leader Hassan Nasrallah and invaded the south. A ceasefire took effect in November 2024. In January 2025 parliament elected the army commander Joseph Aoun as president after a two-year vacancy, and the jurist Nawaf Salam formed a government.

On 2 March 2026, after the United States and Israel attacked Iran, Hezbollah fired on Israel; Israel responded with air strikes across Lebanon and a ground invasion of the south, and the war killed more than 4,000 people and displaced over a million. The Lebanese government moved to ban Hezbollah's military activity and entered direct talks with Israel, and US-brokered truces from April and an agreement in June were followed by partial Israeli withdrawals from some areas in July. Israeli troops still occupy parts of the south and strikes continue, while the state's efforts to disarm Hezbollah have divided the country.