Lebanon

The territory of present-day Lebanon contains some of the oldest continuously inhabited urban sites in the world. From roughly the third millennium BCE, the narrow coastal strip between Mount Lebanon and the Mediterranean was settled by Canaanite communities whose port cities, known to the Greeks as the Phoenicians, included Byblos, Tyre, Sidon, and Berytus. Phoenician seafarers established trading networks across the Mediterranean from the late second millennium BCE, exporting cedar timber, purple dye, and an alphabetic script that would shape later writing systems. Successive imperial powers absorbed these cities, including the Egyptians, Assyrians, Neo-Babylonians, and Achaemenid Persians, before Alexander the Great's conquest in 332 BCE brought the region into the Hellenistic world under the Seleucids.

Roman annexation in 64 BCE incorporated the coast into the province of Syria, and Berytus, refounded as a Roman colony, became a famed center of legal scholarship. The region passed to the Byzantine Empire after the partition of 395 CE and was conquered by the Arab Muslim armies in the 630s, after which Mount Lebanon developed as a refuge for confessional minorities, most notably the Maronite Christians and, from the eleventh century, the Druze. Crusader principalities held parts of the coast between 1099 and the late thirteenth century, when the Mamluks of Egypt completed their reconquest. In 1516 the Ottoman Sultan Selim I incorporated the area into his empire, and for the next four centuries it was governed through local emirates, most prominently those of the Maan and Shihab dynasties on Mount Lebanon.

Sectarian conflict in 1860 prompted European intervention and the creation of the autonomous Mutasarrifate of Mount Lebanon under Ottoman sovereignty with international guarantees. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, the League of Nations awarded France a mandate over the territory, and in 1920 the French High Commissioner proclaimed Greater Lebanon by attaching the Bekaa, Tripoli, Sidon, and Tyre to the historic mountain heartland. A constitution promulgated in 1926 established a parliamentary republic, and an unwritten National Pact of 1943 distributed the principal offices among Maronite, Sunni, and Shia communities. Independence was declared in 1943, and the last French troops withdrew in 1946.

The early decades of independence brought relative prosperity and a brief civil crisis in 1958. Demographic shifts, the arrival of Palestinian refugees, and confessional rivalries culminated in the civil war of 1975 to 1990, which drew in Syrian forces from 1976 and Israeli forces, which invaded in 1978 and again in 1982 and occupied a southern security zone until 2000. The Taif Agreement of 1989 ended the war by rebalancing power between the presidency, the premiership, and the speakership, and Syrian troops remained as a de facto power broker until their withdrawal in 2005, prompted by the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and the popular Cedar Revolution.

Subsequent years saw the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, recurrent governmental paralysis, the strain of the Syrian refugee influx after 2011, the mass protest movement of October 2019, the catastrophic Beirut port explosion of August 2020, and a prolonged financial collapse. After a more than two-year vacancy, parliament elected Joseph Aoun to the presidency in January 2025. Lebanon today is a unitary parliamentary republic operating under a confessional power-sharing system inherited from the National Pact and refined at Taif.