Listed 3 sub titles with search on: Information about the place for destination: "BEIRUT Town LEBANON".
An ancient Phoenician city on the coast at the foot of the Lebanon
mountains. It did not become important until the end of the Hellenistic period.
It was made a Roman colony about 14 B.C. Herod the Great, Agrippa I and II, and
Queen Berenice built exedras, porticos, temples, a forum, a theater, amphitheater,
and baths here. In the 3d c. A.D. the city became the seat of a famous school
of law and continued to flourish until the earthquake of A.D. 551 ravaged the
city.
The Hellenistic town lay S of the port. Its streets, laid out on a
grid plan, are spaced at roughly the same intervals as those of Beroea, Damascus,
and Laodicea. The new Roman city spread farther S and W, with its forum near the
Place de l'Etoile. On its N side was a civic basilica 99 m long with a Corinthian
portico of polychrome materials (now in front of the Beirut Museum), dating from
the 1st c. A.D. Some large baths have been uncovered on the E slope of the Colline
du Serail, and the hippodrome lay on the NW side of the same hill. Some villas
in a S suburb facing the sea had mosaic floors (now in the Beirut Museum).
Some 12 km upstream on the Beirut river are the ruined arches of an
aqueduct. The rocky spur of Deir el-Qalaa was Berytus' high place; the podium
of a large temple can still be seen.
J. P. Rey-Coquais, ed.
This text is from: The Princeton encyclopedia of classical sites,
Princeton University Press 1976. Cited Nov 2002 from
Perseus Project URL below, which contains bibliography & interesting hyperlinks.
Called in the Old Test. Berotha and Berothai. The modern Beirut; an ancient town of Phoenicia, about twenty-four miles south of Byblus, famous in the age of Justinian for the study of law, and styled by that emperor "the mother and nurse of the laws." The civil law was taught there in Greek, as it was at Rome in Latin. It had also the name of Colonia Felix Iulia, from Augustus Caesar, who made it a Roman colony, and named it in honour of his daughter. The adjacent plain is renowned as the place where St. George, the patron saint of England, slew the dragon; in memory of which a small chapel was built upon the spot, dedicated at first to that Christian hero, but now changed to a mosque. It was frequently captured and recaptured during the Crusades.
This text is cited Oct 2002 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
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