Lebanon's history: a mountain enlarged into a state of shared offices

How the coastal cities traded before Lebanon existed

Tools found in caves along the coast show the area inhabited from the Old Stone Age onward, and Britannica places the first traces of pottery and metalworking in the territory at Byblos, modern Jubayl, by the fourth millennium BC. The first urban settlement at Byblos is dated to about 3050 to 2850 BC. The Greeks called the people of these towns Phoenicians; Britannica describes them as indistinguishable from the Canaanites further south, and finds little evidence for the classical tradition that they migrated from elsewhere.

What Egypt wanted from this coast was timber. A temple relief at Karnak shows the chiefs of Lebanon felling cedars for the officers of Seti I in about 1300 BC, and The Story of Wen-Amon, set in about 1100 BC, describes an Egyptian official sent to Byblos for cedar and received there with little ceremony, a sign of how far Egyptian authority had fallen.

The cities never formed one state. Each had its own king, chosen from a royal house and checked by merchant families and a council of elders, and Britannica notes that no sense of political unity bound them. After raiders from the sea destroyed much of the coast in the late 13th century BC, many of Sidon's people fled to Tyre, which then grew and founded colonies: Utica in North Africa perhaps as early as the 10th century BC, then Carthage, which led the western settlements until Rome destroyed it in 146 BC.

The coast passed from one empire to the next. Persia under Cyrus took the city-states in 539 BC; Alexander burned Tyre and took the region in 332 BC; Pompey's army made it Roman in 64 BC. Christianity reached the coastal plain from Galilee in the 1st century AD. Four of the sites from these centuries, Byblos, Tyre, Baalbek and Anjar, were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List together in 1984.

Why so many communities settled in the mountain

Britannica dates the population's present form to the 7th century AD. The Maronites, followers of the hermit Maron who had left northern Syria under persecution, settled in the northern Lebanon Mountains, took in the peasants already there and kept Syriac for their liturgy while adopting Arabic for speech. Arab tribesmen settled in the south after the Muslim conquest of Syria, and in the 11th century many of them took up the Druze faith, which made south Lebanon its centre. Shia Muslims settled on the northern and southern fringes of the mountains and in the Bekaa; the coastal towns became mainly Sunni.

The Umayyads ruled Beirut and Mount Lebanon from Damascus between 661 and 750. At the end of the 11th century the Crusader states divided the territory, the north going to the County of Tripoli and the south to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and in this period the Maronite church affirmed the supremacy of the pope while keeping its own patriarch and liturgy. Saladin took Beirut in 1187, and in the 1280s and 1290s the territory became part of the Mamluk state of Egypt and Syria, split among several provinces. Under the Mamluks Tripoli grew as a port while Tyre declined.

The pattern Britannica describes for these centuries is the one later politics inherited: the coast and the Bekaa governed directly by whoever held Damascus or Cairo, and the mountain largely left to manage its own affairs.

How Mount Lebanon governed itself under the Ottomans

Selim I defeated the Mamluks in 1516 and 1517 and took Lebanon into the Ottoman Empire. Aleppo or Tripoli governed the north, Damascus the centre and, after 1660, Sidon the south, while Mount Lebanon kept a semi-autonomous status under families of notables, some Christian and some Druze. From them came the house of Maʿn, accepted by both communities. Fakhr al-Din II ruled most of Lebanon from 1593 to 1633. When the Maʿn line died out in 1697 the notables chose a prince from the Shihab family, who ruled until 1842.

Silk was the principal export from the 17th century to the 20th, traded through European houses in Sidon and the other coastal towns. Bashir II, prince from 1788 to 1840, allied with the Egyptian army of Ibrahim Pasha when it occupied Lebanon and Syria in 1831. When Anglo-Ottoman intervention ended Egyptian rule in 1840, Bashir was deposed, and the principality ended with his successor's removal in 1842.

Relations between the Maronites and the Druze worsened from that point, with France backing the first and Britain a section of the second. The conflict ended in the massacre of Maronites by Druze in 1860, which brought direct French intervention. The powers then imposed the Organic Regulation of 1861, modified in 1864, under which Mount Lebanon was governed as an autonomous province by a Christian governor appointed by the sultan and advised by a council drawn from its communities.

Mission schools multiplied in the same decades. The American mission founded the Syrian Protestant College, now the American University of Beirut, in 1866, and the Jesuits opened Université Saint-Joseph in 1875. Many Christians emigrated to the Americas and Egypt toward the end of the century. During the First World War the Ottoman government placed the mountain under strict control, and the famine of 1915 to 1918 killed about 200,000 of the roughly 400,000 people of the Mount Lebanon district, according to the figures in Wikipedia's history of Lebanon.

How France drew the borders of Greater Lebanon

Allied forces occupied the territory at the end of the war and placed it under French military administration. Decree 318 of 31 August 1920 added Beirut, the former Ottoman districts of Tripoli and Sidon and the Bekaa valley to the old autonomous mountain, nearly doubling its size, and General Henri Gouraud proclaimed the State of Greater Lebanon on 1 September 1920. The League of Nations formally gave France the mandate for Lebanon and Syria in 1923.

The enlargement changed the arithmetic. Britannica's account is that the population of the new state was roughly evenly divided between Christians and Muslims, and that a large part of it wanted neither French rule nor an independent Lebanon but union with a larger Syrian or Arab state. The constitution promulgated on 23 May 1926 required each community to be equitably represented in public office, and by convention the president came to be a Maronite, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim and the speaker a Shia Muslim.

The census of 1932 recorded a slight Christian majority; it is the last official census the country has taken. A Franco-Lebanese treaty of 1936 was never ratified in Paris. Vichy authorities controlled Lebanon from 1940 until British and Free French troops occupied it in 1941. In 1943 the nationalists won the elections and their leader, Bishara al-Khuri, became president. When the new government struck the French mandate's traces from the constitution, the French arrested the president and almost the entire government on 11 November 1943. An insurrection and British diplomatic pressure followed, the French released them, and independence dates from 22 November 1943. The last British and French troops left by the end of 1946.

The National Pact of 1943 was never written down. Under it, as summarised in its standard accounts, Christians would not seek Western intervention and Muslims would give up the aim of union with Syria, and parliamentary seats would be held in a ratio of six Christians to five Muslims.

What strained the pact between independence and war

Lebanon kept its parliamentary system through the first decades, and Britannica identifies the main test as keeping the National Pact intact under pressure from outside. Khuri's re-election in 1949 followed a constitutional amendment and elections in 1947 that Britannica describes as manipulated; a general strike forced him out in September 1952.

In 1958, after Egypt and Syria formed the United Arab Republic, opponents of President Camille Chamoun demanded that Lebanon join it and Muslims in Tripoli rose in armed insurrection. The army commander, Fuad Chehab, refused to attack the insurgents for fear the army would split along communal lines. United States Marines landed outside Beirut in July 1958 at Chamoun's request, and parliament then chose Chehab as president. His administration equalised Christian and Muslim appointments to the civil service in 1959 and founded state bodies such as the Litani River Authority to develop the largely Shia south.

Beirut grew quickly in the 1960s and early 1970s and, in Britannica's account, a ring of poor settlements formed around it. Palestinian guerrillas moved into Lebanon after their expulsion from Jordan, and by 1973 roughly one in ten people in the country was Palestinian. Militias organised along sectarian lines multiplied as the state lost its monopoly of force.

How the civil war divided Beirut and the army

Many date the war to 13 April 1975, when Phalangist gunmen attacked a bus carrying Palestinians to the camp at Tell al-Zaatar. A "green line" through the destroyed central market of Beirut divided the Muslim west of the city from the Christian east until 1990, and the army split into its sectarian parts.

Outside states entered early. Syria intervened on a large scale in June 1976, at that stage to stop the Palestinian forces and the Lebanese National Movement from defeating the Christian militias. Israel armed Christian forces in the south and, in March 1978, sent troops as far as the Litani River; the Security Council created the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) on 19 March 1978 to confirm Israel's withdrawal. Israel invaded again on 6 June 1982, stating that its aim was to stop raids by the Palestine Liberation Organization, and besieged West Beirut. The PLO left for Tunis. President-elect Bashir Gemayel was assassinated in September 1982, and two days later Christian militiamen let into the area by Israeli forces killed people in the Sabra and Shatila camps, a toll Britannica gives as estimates ranging from several hundred to several thousand. Hezbollah was among the Shia groups that formed after the invasion.

Bombings in April and October 1983 hit the United States embassy and the barracks of the multinational force, which withdrew early in 1984; most Israeli troops left in 1985, leaving the South Lebanon Army in a buffer zone. The pound collapsed in 1987. When President Amin Gemayel's term ended on 22 September 1988 without a successor, two rival governments claimed authority.

Most of the parliament elected in 1972 met at Taif in Saudi Arabia and on 22 October 1989 accepted a reform package. It reduced the president's powers against those of the prime minister and speaker, changed the ratio of seats to half Christian and half Muslim, and set the abolition of political sectarianism as a goal without a timetable. Parliament ratified it on 5 November 1989. René Moawad, elected president that day, was assassinated on 22 November. Fighting ended on 13 October 1990, when Syrian troops attacked the forces of General Michel Aoun and forced him into exile. Britannica's count of the whole war is more than 100,000 killed and nearly 1,000,000 displaced.

Who governed Lebanon after Taif

The Taif settlement left Syria with a contingent Britannica puts at some 30,000 troops through the 1990s, and Israel in a self-declared security zone in the south, where it fought Hezbollah until it withdrew in 2000. Rafic al-Hariri, prime minister from 1992 to 1998 and from 2000 to 2004, led a reconstruction financed partly on European bond markets. Britannica records that sectarian allegiance became more geographically fixed after the war, because the fighting had emptied most of the mixed districts.

Hariri was assassinated on 14 February 2005. Mass demonstrations for and against the Syrian presence followed, and the last 250 Syrian troops left on 26 April 2005. Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers in July 2006 began a 34-day war, from 12 July to 14 August, in which Britannica counts more than 1,100 Lebanese and about 160 Israelis killed; Security Council Resolution 1701 ended it. Syria and Lebanon established diplomatic relations for the first time in 2008.

The crisis that began in 2019 was financial. Protests started in October 2019 over a proposed tax on internet calls; in March 2020 the state defaulted on a foreign debt payment for the first time; on 4 August 2020 about 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored at the port exploded and killed 218 people. The World Bank's country overview records that the crisis cost the pound 98% of its value. In the elections of May 2022 the bloc of Hezbollah and its allies lost its majority, and when the presidential term expired in October 2022 the office stayed vacant until parliament elected the army commander in January 2025.

How the wars after Gaza reached Lebanon

Hezbollah began firing on northern Israel on 8 October 2023, the day after the Hamas attack on Israel, and said it would stop only with a ceasefire in Gaza. In September 2024 pagers and radios belonging to Hezbollah members exploded across Lebanon, Israeli air strikes killed Hassan Nasrallah on 27 September, and Israeli ground forces entered the south on 1 October. A ceasefire took effect on 27 November 2024. The Lebanese government reported 2,720 people killed by Israel in that phase; Israel reported 56 of its soldiers killed.

Fighting resumed on 2 March 2026, after the United States and Israel attacked Iran. Hezbollah said it acted to force an end to Israeli strikes and an Israeli withdrawal; Israel said it was striking Hezbollah. Britannica records more than 1,100,000 people displaced by the end of March 2026, and on 24 March Israel's defence minister announced a plan to occupy the south up to the Litani River. The cabinet banned Hezbollah's military activity, and on 9 March 2026 parliament extended its own term and moved the elections due in May 2026 to 2028. A ceasefire agreed on 16 April 2026 was extended several times, and the two governments held their first direct talks in decades. Lebanon's Ministry of Public Health put the number killed since 2 March 2026 at more than 4,300 in figures reported at the end of September 2026.

The Security Council's Resolution 2790 of 2025 extended UNIFIL for the last time, to 31 December 2026, with its withdrawal to follow during 2027.