Who ruled Tyre?

Tyre lies on the southern coast of Lebanon, about 80 kilometres south of Beirut, on what was once an island just off the shore. One of the great cities of the Phoenicians, it sent merchants and colonists across the Mediterranean, was by tradition the mother city of Carthage, and resisted Assyrian and Babylonian kings before falling to Alexander the Great. Its Roman, Byzantine and Crusader remains are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it is now Lebanon's fifth-largest city.

Ancient Tyre had two parts: the walled city on its rocky island, and a settlement on the mainland later called Palaetyrus, "Old Tyre". The Roman historian Justin wrote that its founders came from Sidon. When Herodotus visited around 450 BCE, the priests told him the city had been founded some 2,300 years earlier, around 2750 BCE (archaeology has broadly supported this). From the seventeenth century BCE Tyre was under Egyptian supremacy, and around 1350 BCE its prince Abimilku wrote to the pharaoh in letters found at Amarna.

As Egyptian control of the coast faded, the cities of Phoenicia grew rich on sea trade. Written tradition credits much of Tyre's rise to Hiram I, king from 969 BCE, who is said to have joined two islets into one and supplied cedar and craftsmen for Solomon's temple in Jerusalem. Tyrians founded colonies in the Aegean, North Africa, Sicily and Spain, and legend holds that the princess Elissa, or Dido, founded Carthage in 814 BCE. The city's purple dye, extracted from murex shellfish, was a luxury reserved for royalty and nobles.

Tyre paid tribute to the Assyrian kings but kept much of its freedom; Shalmaneser V besieged it from about 725 to 720 BCE without taking it. Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon began a thirteen-year siege in 586 BCE that also failed, though the exhausted city agreed to pay tribute. Persia took Tyre in 539 BCE, and its ships served the Persian kings. In 332 BCE Alexander the Great, refused permission to sacrifice in the island temple, laid siege to the city, demolishing Old Tyre to build a causeway across the strait. Some 8,000 Tyrians were reportedly killed and 30,000 sold into slavery. Sand later built up along the causeway and joined the island permanently to the shore.

Tyre passed among Alexander's successors, from the Ptolemies to the Seleucids, regained its independence in 126 BCE and from 64 BCE was a privileged free city under Rome. Hadrian gave it the title of metropolis, a vast hippodrome holding some 30,000 spectators was built, and in 198 CE it became the capital of the province of Syria Phoenice. The bishop Eusebius described the cathedral of Paulinus, inaugurated in 315, in what is considered the oldest account of a church building.

Earthquakes in the sixth century, worst of all in 551, shattered the Byzantine city. After a Persian occupation, Arab forces of the Rashidun Caliphate took Tyre in 640, and under the Umayyads, Abbasids and Fatimids it prospered from glass, dye and sugar. On 7 July 1124, after holding out under siege for five and a half months, it fell to the Crusaders and their Venetian allies, the last city they took after the First Crusade, and it became one of the chief cities of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. When Saladin captured Jerusalem in 1187, Tyre held out under Conrad of Montferrat and for four years was the kingdom's only city in Frankish hands.

In 1291 the army of the Mamluk Sultanate found the city largely deserted, its people having fled by sea, and pulled down its fortifications. Tyre sank into obscurity; Ibn Battuta found it in ruins in 1355.

The Ottomans conquered the Levant in 1516, and in the early seventeenth century the Druze emir Fakhreddine II encouraged Shia and Christian settlers to move into the area, laying the basis of the modern population. In 1920 Tyre was attached to the French-mandated State of Greater Lebanon, and it later became part of independent Lebanon. Large-scale excavations began in 1946, uncovering the hippodrome and a vast Roman and Byzantine necropolis, but stopped with the civil war of 1975–1990. UNESCO listed the site in 1984, partly to shield it from war damage and unplanned building. The city has since been struck repeatedly in conflicts with Israel, including the 2006 war and airstrikes in 2024 and 2026. In 2016 about 200,000 people lived in the urban area, including residents of three Palestinian refugee camps.