Tyre

1 · POSITION

Tyre, on the coast of southern Lebanon, was a leading Phoenician city-state between the ninth and sixth centuries BC, settling colonies round the Mediterranean — Carthage and Leptis Magna among them. UNESCO inscribed it in 1984. The register holds it as the port that sent its people out to found other ports. [1]

2 · AN ISLAND CITY

Herodotus was told by its priests that the city had been founded 2,300 years before his time, about 2750 BC. It stood on an island some eight hundred metres offshore, with two harbours, the Sidonian to the north and the Egyptian to the south. [1, 2]

3 · ALEXANDER’S CAUSEWAY

In 332 BC Alexander besieged it for about seven months and reached it by building a causeway some 750 metres long across the shallows. Over the following centuries silt widened the causeway into the sandy isthmus that joins the old island to the shore today. [1, 2]

4 · TYRE TODAY

Most of what stands is Roman — baths and an arena — with a twelfth-century cathedral and Crusader walls. The Tyre International Festival has been held in the Roman hippodrome since the mid-1990s, and the city still has one of Lebanon’s ports. [1, 3]

5 · ⚑ CANDOUR

⚑ The founding date is the priests’ claim reported by Herodotus. The purple dye for which Tyre is famous is not described by the main source read and is not used. [1–3]