Tyre

Tyre, Lebanon

Tyre

Tyre, modern Arabic Ṣūr, French Tyr or Sour, Latin Tyrus, Hebrew Zor or Tsor, town on the Mediterranean coast of southern Lebanon, located 12 miles (19 km) north of the modern border with Israel and 25 miles (40 km) south of Sidon (modern Ṣaydā). It was a major Phoenician seaport from about 2000 bce through the Roman period.

Tyre, built on an island and on the neighbouring mainland, was probably originally founded as a colony of Sidon. Mentioned in Egyptian records of the 14th century bce as being subject to Egypt, Tyre became independent when Egyptian influence in Phoenicia declined. It later surpassed Sidon as a trade centre, developing commercial relations with all parts of the Mediterranean world. In the 9th century bce colonists from Tyre founded the North African city of Carthage, which later became Rome’s principal rival in the West. The town is frequently mentioned in the Bible (Old and New Testaments) as having had close ties with Israel. Hiram, king of Tyre (reigned 969–936), furnished building materials for Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem (10th century), and the notorious Jezebel, wife of King Ahab, was the daughter of Ethbaal, “king of Tyre and Sidon.” In the 10th and 9th centuries Tyre probably enjoyed some primacy over the other cities of Phoenicia and was ruled by kings whose power was limited by a merchant oligarchy.

Tyre, Lebanon

For much of the 8th and 7th centuries bce the town was subject to Assyria, and in 585–573 it successfully withstood a prolonged siege by the Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar II. Between 538 and 332 it was ruled by the Achaemenian kings of Persia. In this period it lost its hegemony in Phoenicia but continued to flourish. Probably the best-known episode in the history of Tyre was its resistance to the army of the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great, who took it after a seven-month siege in 332. He completely destroyed the mainland portion of the town and used its rubble to build an immense causeway (some 2,600 feet [800 metres] long and 600–900 feet [180–270 metres] wide) to gain access to the island section. After the town’s capture, 10,000 inhabitants were put to death, and 30,000 were sold into slavery. Alexander’s causeway, which was never removed, converted the island into a peninsula.

Tyre was subsequently under the influence of Ptolemaic Egypt and in 200 became part of the Hellenistic Seleucid kingdom. It came under Roman rule in 64 bce and was renowned in Roman times for its textiles and for a purple dye extracted from sea snails of the genus Murex (the dye was said to be worth more than its weight in gold, and purple cloth became a symbol of wealth and of royalty). By the 2nd century ce it had a sizable Christian community, and the Christian scholar Origen was buried there (c. 254). Tyre was under Muslim rule from 638 to 1124, when it fell to the Crusaders, and until the 13th century it was a principal town of the kingdom of Jerusalem. The Holy Roman emperor Frederick I Barbarossa, who died on the Third Crusade, was buried in its 12th-century cathedral. Captured and destroyed by the Muslim Mamlūks in 1291, the town never recovered its former importance.

Excavations have uncovered remains of the Greco-Roman, Crusader, Arab, and Byzantine civilizations, but most of the remains of the Phoenician period lie beneath the present town. Areas of archaeological note include the ruins of a Crusader church, a street with a 2nd-century mosaic pavement and a double colonnade of white green-veined marble, Roman baths, the ruins of a Roman-Byzantine necropolis, and the largest Roman hippodrome ever discovered. Built in the 2nd century, the hippodrome hosted chariot races with a capacity of 20,000 spectators.

In 1984 UNESCO designated the historic town a World Heritage site. In the late 20th century the ruins were damaged by bombardment, most notably in 1982 and 1996 during Israeli offensives in southern Lebanon. The site is threatened by urban growth, looting, and the decay of stone because of airborne pollution. In 1998 UNESCO created a special fund for the preservation and archaeological excavation of the ancient treasures of Tyre.

The economy of the town was upset by the unrest of the late 20th century. Fishing remains a major source of income. Pop. (2003 est.) 117,100.