Beirut

Berytus Nutrix Legum—'Beirut, Mother of Laws'—was the motto of a Roman law school so influential that two of its professors helped compile the Corpus Juris Civilis, the legal code that shaped Western jurisprudence for a millennium. That school was destroyed by an earthquake in 551 AD, along with 30,000 of its students and citizens, and the city that rebuilt from the rubble has been destroyed and rebuilt at least seven times since. This is not metaphor. Beirut's pattern of catastrophic destruction followed by reconstruction is the most compressed cycle of any major Mediterranean city.

Phoenician traders established Biruta on this natural harbor—one of the few sheltered anchorages on the Levantine coast—by the fourteenth century BCE, as recorded in the Tell al-Amarna tablets. The Romans made it a colonia in 14 BCE under Augustus, settling veterans of two legions and building the most thoroughly Romanized city in the eastern provinces. The law school emerged in the first century CE and operated for five centuries, attracting students from across the empire to a five-year course in Roman legal analysis. When the 551 earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent fire obliterated the city, the best professors relocated to Constantinople. The school never reopened; the Arab conquest of 635 AD closed that chapter permanently.

The Ottoman centuries saw Beirut as a provincial port, eclipsed by Damascus and Aleppo. Its modern reinvention began under the French Mandate (1920–1943), when it became the capital of Greater Lebanon and the financial center of the Arab world. Banking secrecy laws modeled on Switzerland's attracted capital from across the Middle East, earning the city the title 'Switzerland of the East' and then 'Paris of the Middle East.' The fifteen-year civil war (1975–1990) split the city along the Green Line—a no-man's-land of snipers and rubble dividing Christian east from Muslim west. Prime Minister Rafik Hariri's postwar reconstruction channeled billions through Solidere, a private company that razed and rebuilt the downtown core, erasing archaeological layers to create a luxury district that many Lebanese could not afford.

On 4 August 2020, 2,750 tonnes of improperly stored ammonium nitrate detonated in the Port of Beirut—one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history. The blast killed over 220 people, injured 7,000, left 300,000 homeless, and caused an estimated $15 billion in damage. It arrived atop an economic collapse already underway: since 2019, the Lebanese pound has lost over 98% of its value, poverty surged from 20% to over 80%, and the banking system froze depositors' savings. The World Bank called it one of the three worst economic crises globally since the mid-nineteenth century.

By early 2025, the currency stabilized at roughly 89,000 LBP to the dollar, parliament elected army chief Joseph Aoun as president, and the investigation into the port explosion—suspended for years—resumed. Reconstruction needs are estimated at $11 billion. Beirut's history suggests it will rebuild again. The question, as always, is what gets erased in the process—and whether the institutions that emerge will be more resilient than the ones that collapsed, or simply new vessels for the same structural weaknesses.