The Phoenician city where the alphabet was born — Roman hippodrome, crusader columns, and fresh fish on the Mediterranean
Tyre (Sur in Arabic) is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1984 and the city that gave Phoenician purple dye to the ancient world — the Murex sea snail harvested from the waters off Tyre produced the colour reserved for Roman emperors and Byzantine royalty. The ancient site splits into two zones: Al-Bass (a Roman necropolis with one of the most extraordinary triumphal arches in the Middle East, leading to a 480m colonnaded road and a hippodrome that once seated 20,000 spectators) and the southern peninsula (the ancient harbour area…
Tyre was founded around 2750 BCE and became the dominant Phoenician city-state by 1000 BCE, sending out colonies across the Mediterranean from Carthage to Cadiz. Alexander the Great's seven-month siege of 332 BCE (building a causeway from the mainland to the island city) is one of the most famous military engineering feats of antiquity. The city was subsequently held by Seleucids, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, and Crusaders before falling to the Mamluk sultanate in 1291.