THE ancient city of Tyre, whose 250,000 inhabitants were ordered by Israel to flee their homes this week, is one of the world's great cultural treasures, with monuments dating back to Phoenician times 3,000 years before Christ.
Now a small, dusty port city, it has a rich history and heritage as the centre of the ancient Phoenician civilisation, and a tormented recent history due to its position on the last active frontline in the Arab Israeli conflict.
The city is economically depressed, like the rest of south Lebanon, due to 20 years of war and foreign invasions. Last year Israeli gunboats blockaded Tyre for months, preventing its fishermen from reaching their fishing grounds.
Declared a Universal Heritage City in the 1980s by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco), Tyre has seen many conquerors come and go since its foundation in 2,750 BC. These include the ancient Egyptians, Macedonians, Romans, Greeks, Byzantines, Crusaders, Mamelukes and finally the Arabs.
The city, twinned in the Bible with Sidon, which lies on the coast further north, was one of 100 world cultural landmarks declared an endangered site last month by the World Monuments Fund, a private New York group.
Its ancient monuments include a Roman hippodrome, a triumphal arch erected by Alexander the Great, extensive Roman and Byzantine necropoli, a Roman forum and an avenue of Roman columns leading towards the sea. Traces of the Phoenician port and an early Christian basilica also exist.
Tyre was the greatest city of the Phoenicians, a renowned trading and navigating people who lived along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. It built its wealth by developing and trading a purple dye obtained from a seashell called murex, and purple became the colour of royalty in the ancient world.
Tyre also colonised parts of the Mediterranean basin. Elissar, princess of Tyre, founded the great north African city of Carthage in the 9th century BC after leaving Tyre because of a quarrels over inheritance with her brother, Pygmalion. Carthage became the greatest of the Phoenician colonies and rose to challenge the might of Rome.
In Biblical times, Tyre was famed for the great temple to Melkart, god of merchants and navigators. The temple, which had emerald columns, was the model for the temple of the Jewish king Solomon in Jerusalem.
Solomon and Ahiram, king of Tyre, were friends and business partners whose trading fleets plied the Mediterranean. Solomon brought Tyrian workmen to Jerusalem to build his temple.
One of Solomon's wives came from Sidon, and later in life, according to the Bible, he built a temple outside Jerusalem to the Phoenician goddess Astarte, a prototype of Venus.