Lebanon

From the Phoenician harbours of Tyre, Sidon and Byblos to the confessional republic of the cedars.

Lebanon is a narrow, mountainous land on the eastern Mediterranean whose coastal cities—Byblos, Sidon and Tyre—were the great harbours of Phoenicia, seafaring traders who carried the alphabet across the ancient world. Its rugged interior long sheltered marginalised communities, above all the Maronite Christians and the Druze, and under the Maan and Shihab emirs Mount Lebanon developed a distinct autonomy within the Ottoman Empire. After the 1860 sectarian conflict and the collapse of the Ottoman order, France created the State of Greater Lebanon in 1920, and the country won full independence on 22 November 1943 under an unwritten National Pact that distributed power among its religious communities. Prosperity made mid-century Beirut a regional financial and cultural capital, but a devastating civil war (1975–1990), foreign interventions, and a catastrophic economic collapse and port explosion after 2019 have severely tested the republic into the present.