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No. 55

Tyre

On land Mediterranean
Ancient columns lie in the submerged Egyptian harbour of Tyre/Sour, South Lebanon, with the skyline of the modern city in the background.
RomanDeckert, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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Where
Lebanon
Built by
Phoenicians
Era
2700 BCE onward
Known for
Royal purple dye, and the island city Alexander reached by building a causeway.
How it ended
Fell to Alexander in 332 BCE.
The city of Tyre/Sour in Southern Lebanon photographed from the International Space Station (ISS). Image courtesy of the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, NASA Johnson Space Center: https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/
Image courtesy of the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, NASA Johnson Space Center, Public domain
A group of rocky islands off the Western shore of the Tyre/Sour peninsula, Southern Lebanon, with the skyline of the Christian quarter in the background.
RomanDeckert, CC BY-SA 4.0
A 22° halo over the UNESCO World Heritage archaeological site of Al Mina (City site) on Southwestern side of Tyre/Sour peninsula, Southern Lebanon, with the Roman period sarcophagus of one Antipater in the centre.
RomanDeckert, CC BY-SA 4.0
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Background

Tyre is a city in Lebanon, and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. It was one of the earliest Phoenician metropolises and the legendary birthplace of Europa, her brothers Cadmus and Phoenix, and Carthage's founder Dido (Elissa). The city has many ancient sites, including the Tyre Hippodrome, and was added as a whole to the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 1984. The historian Ernest Renan described it as "a city of ruins, built out of ruins".

Tyre is the fifth-largest city in Lebanon after Beirut, Tripoli, Sidon, and Baalbek. It is the capital of the Tyre District in the South Governorate. There were approximately 200,000 inhabitants in the Tyre urban area in 2016, including many refugees, as the city hosts three of the twelve Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon: Burj El Shimali, El Buss, and Rashidieh.

Text from Wikipedia, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

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