Beirut, along with Byblos, Tyre and Sidon is one of the oldest cities on the Phoenician coast.
Acheulean bifacial tools, exhumed at Ras Beirut in the northwest part of the promontory, date back to approximately 600,000 BC.
During this epoch, toward the end of the Lower Paleolithic, the two largest hills of the present day city were islands.
The Canaanites later called Phoenicians by the Greeks were the first community of settlers around Beirut in 4000 BC.
It was not until the fourteenth century that the first known mention of Beirut occurs in an ancient text. It was from the letter written during 1377-1360 BC that a local king sent to the pharaoh of Egypt.
Beirut, like the rest of Phoenicia, had been under Egyptian rule since the XIIth dynasty (1540 BC onwards).
After Alexander the Great had conquered the Near East the city was Hellenized under the rule of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid dynasties.
Under the Seleucids, who rules Syria after Alexander (since the end of the 4th BC), Beirut was renamed Laodicea. It was destroyed in a war of succession by Tryphon in 140 BC, but it rose again to enter one of its most glorious periods under Roman rule since 64 BC.
Beirut was a trading city known for its silk and purple dyeing. Around 238 AD the school of Roman law as is mentioned for the first time.
From 635 to 1110, Beirut was rules by the Yemeni-Arab Arslan family whose principality based in Beirut foreshadowed the modern Lebanese state.
From 1001 to 1236 the city was rules by Crusaders as part of their Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.
City of Beirut
