page_title: Tyre, Lebanon
section_title: Cultural heritage
hierarchical_section_title: Tyre, Lebanon / Cultural heritage
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Honor Frost e Maurizio Vento
context_page_description: Tyre is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world, though in medieval times for some centuries by just a tiny population. It was one of the earliest Phoenician metropolises and the legendary birthplace of Europa, her brothers Cadmus and Phoenix, as well as Carthage's founder Dido. The city has many ancient sites, including the Tyre Hippodrome, and was added as a whole to UNESCO's list of World Heritage Sites in 1984.
  The historian Ernest Renan noted:
  One can call Tyre a city of ruins, built out of ruins.
  Today Tyre is the fifth largest city in Lebanon after Beirut, Tripoli, Aley and Sidon, 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.
context_section_description: Arguably the most lasting Phoenician legacy for the Tyrian population has been the linguistic mark that the Syriac and Akkadian languages have left on the Arabic spoken in the region of Tyre. Most notably, the widely used term "Ba'ali" – which is used especially to describe vegetables and fruits from rain-fed, untreated agricultural production – originates from the Baal religion. The Tyrian municipality of Ain Baal is apparently also named after the Phoenician deity. The most visible part of ancient and medieval history on the other side have been the archaeological sites though:
  After the first archaeological excavations by Renan - who became controversial because of his racist view - and Sepp in the 1860s and 1870s respectively, more were undertaken in 1903 by the Greek archaeologist Theodore Makridi, curator of the Imperial Museum at Constantinople. Important findings like fragments of marble sarcophagi were sent to the Ottoman capital.
  In 1921, an archaeological survey of Tyre was done by a French team under the leadership of Denyse Le Lasseur in 1921, followed by another mission between 1934 and 1936 that included aerial surveys and diving expeditions. It was led by the Jesuit missionary Antoine Poidebard, a pioneer of aerial archaeology.
  Large-scale excavations started in 1946 under the leadership of Emir Maurice Chéhab (1904-1994), "the father of modern Lebanese archaeology" who for decades headed the Antiquities Service in Lebanon and was the curator of the National Museum of Beirut. His teams uncovered most remains in the Al Bass/Hippodrome and the City Site/Roman baths.
  During the 1960s, Honor Frost – the Cyprus-born pioneer of underwater archaeology initiated several investigations "aimed at identifying and documenting the significant archaeological potential for harbour facilities within coastal Tyre." Based on the results, she suggested that the Al Mobarakee Tower may actually date back to Hellenistic times.
  All those works stopped though soon after the 1975 beginning of the Civil War and many records were lost.
  In 1984, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) declared Tyre a World Heritage Site in an attempt to halt the damage being done to the archaeological sites by the armed conflict and by anarchic urban development.
  In the late 1980s, "clandestine excavations" took place in the Al-Bass cemetery which "flooded the antiquities market".
  Regular excavation activities only started again in 1995 under the supervision of Ali Khalil Badawi. Shortly afterwards, an Israeli bomb destroyed an apartment block in the city and evidence for an early church was revealed underneath the rubble. Its unusual design suggests that this was the site of the Cathedral of Paulinus which had been inaugurated in 315 CE
  
  In 1997, the first Phoenician cremation cemetery was uncovered in the Al Bass site, near the Roman necropolis. Meanwhile, Honor Frost mentored local Lebanese archaeologists to conduct further underwater investigations, which in 2001 confirmed the existence of a man-made structure within the northern harbour area of Tyre.
  The hostilities of the 2006 Lebanon War put the ancient structures of Tyre at risk. This prompted UNESCO's Director-General to launch a "Heritage Alert" for the site. Following the cessation of hostilities in September 2006, a visit by conservation experts to Lebanon observed no direct damage to the ancient city of Tyre. However, bombardment had damaged frescoes in a Roman funerary cave at the Tyre Necropolis. Additional site degradation was also noted, including "the lack of maintenance, the decay of exposed structures due to lack of rainwater regulation and the decay of porous and soft stones".
  Since 2008, a Lebanese-French team under the direction by Pierre-Louis Gatier of the University of Lyon has been conducting archaeological and topographical work. When international archeological missions in Syria came to a halt after 2012 due to the war there, someof them instead started excavations in Tyre, amongst them a team headed by Leila Badre, director of the A
caption: Honor Frost
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