Tyre

← Encyclopedia

A snail did the impossible work first. Long before any of the rest of it — the colonies, the kings, the seven months of Alexander hammering at the walls — the prosperity of the island rested on the rotting flesh of sea-creatures piled in vats along the shore. The murex was a spiny shellfish, ugly and small, and from a single gland in its body it gave a few drops of a mucus that turned, in the sun and the air, the deep red-violet that no other process in the ancient world could fix and hold. It took thousands of them to dye a hem. The stench of the dye-yards was notorious; the color was worth its weight in silver. From that one secretion the city took its first fortune and a name that traveled with its ships to the ends of the sea. The Greeks called the coast Phoinike, and one of the readings of the word is the plainest of all: the land of the purple.

The rock

The city’s own name was Ṣur — written 𐤑𐤓 in the Phoenician alphabet, Ṣor in Hebrew, worn down by Greek tongues into Tyros and so into the Latin and English Tyre. The word means, as nearly as can be reconstructed, “the rock,” and the name was a description. Old Tyre was an island, or rather a pair of low rocky islets joined and built over, lying about half a mile off the Lebanese coast in the stretch of shore between Sidon to the north and the headland of Carmel to the south. A second settlement stood on the mainland opposite, the “Old Tyre” the Greeks called Palaetyrus, with the springs and fields the island lacked; but the strength of the place was always the water that ringed it.

How old it was, no one could say with confidence, and the Tyrians themselves told the largest figure. When Herodotus came to the city around the middle of the fifth century BCE and put the question to the priests of the great temple, they answered that their sanctuary had stood since the founding of Tyre, twenty-three centuries before — which would set the foundation near 2750 BCE. Archaeology cannot reach quite so far, but it confirms occupation deep in the Bronze Age, and the city appears by name in the Egyptian and Mesopotamian records of the second millennium as a port already worth a king’s notice. Tyre was a Canaanite town before it was a Phoenician one. The shift in the names marks a shift in language and emphasis rather than in population: the Iron-Age coastal cities — Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, Arwad — were the surviving heart of the older Canaanite world, cut off from the interior by the upheavals around 1200 BCE and turned wholly toward the sea.

What set Tyre apart from its sisters was less its antiquity than its rise. Through the tenth and ninth centuries it eclipsed Sidon and Byblos and became, for a long stretch, the first city of Phoenicia — the workshop of the purple, the home port of the longest-ranging fleets, and the mother of more colonies than any other town on the coast.

The Roman hippodrome of the second century CE in the Al-Bass quarter of Tyre, its limestone tiers stretched along a track once raced by chariots. Photograph by Carole Raddato, CC BY-SA 2.0.

The king of the city

At the center of the island stood the temple of Melqart, and the god and the city were almost a single thing. Mlk-qrt means “king of the city,” and Melqart was exactly that — the divine sovereign of Tyre, its patron and founder-figure, the lord whose fortunes rose and fell with the town’s. The Greeks who traded along the coast looked at him and saw their own Heracles: the wandering hero who fought monsters, opened the far west to navigation, and died into fire to be made a god. By the sixth century BCE the identification was settled, and across the Mediterranean the Tyrian Heracles and Melqart were two names for one deity.

Herodotus, who had a careful eye for sanctuaries, went to see the temple himself and left the earliest outside account of it. He found it rich with offerings and remarked on two pillars standing within, one of pure gold and the other of smaragdos — emerald, or a green stone that he said glowed at night. The priests showed him the antiquity of the place and told him of a second temple of the same god, planted at the Phoenician colony of Thasos in the northern Aegean generations before the Greek Heracles was ever born. The point of the story, for Herodotus, was that the Tyrian Heracles was the older.

The deepest rite of the cult was a death and a waking. Each year, in the spring, the god was held to die and then to rise, and the festival of his rising was called the egersis — the “awakening.” Josephus, drawing on the lost Phoenician history of Menander of Ephesus, recorded that King Hiram of Tyre, in the tenth century BCE, was the first to celebrate the awakening of Heracles. The shape of that festival belongs to the wider Levantine pattern in which a god goes down into death and the world withers, then returns and the year turns green again — the same logic worked out at length in the older Ugaritic cycle of Baal and Mot, Death. Whether the Tyrian egersis descends directly from that cycle, or whether the later Greek and Roman stories of saviors who die and rise owe anything in turn to Melqart, is a thread scholars trace as a family resemblance and leave carefully unjoined; what the inscriptions and Josephus give plainly is that at Tyre the king of the city died and woke every spring, and that a special priesthood, the mqm ʾlm, “raisers of the god,” presided over the waking.

The purple and the reach of the ships

The wealth that paid for the temple came off the sea in two forms: the dye and the trade. The dye was the murex purple, the color the Romans would later lock by law to the bodies of emperors. It was drawn from the hypobranchial gland of several Mediterranean sea-snails — chiefly Bolinus brandaris, the spiny dye-murex, and Hexaplex trunculus. The snails were gathered by the thousands, broken open or milked, their secretion fermented and boiled down; one ancient reckoning held that twelve thousand of them yielded barely a gram and a half of pure dye, enough to color the border of a single garment. The finished shade ran from a reddish purple to something a writer of late antiquity likened to clotted blood, and it did not fade with washing or the sun. A fourth-century source noted that at Colophon the dye fetched its own weight in silver. Tyre did not invent the process, but it perfected and dominated it, and the heaped shells of the broken snails still lie in mounds along its old shore.

The shell of Bolinus brandaris, the spiny dye-murex. The dye lay in a single gland; thousands of the animals went into a few drops of fast purple. Photograph by H. Zell, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The other form of wealth was the carrying trade, and here Tyre’s reach was without rival. Phoenician ships ran a network that drew tin and silver out of the western Mediterranean and beyond, and the Tyrians studded the sea-lanes with their own settlements to anchor it: trading posts and colonies on Cyprus, in Sicily and Sardinia, on the North African coast, and across the strait at the edge of the known world. Tradition held that they sailed past the Pillars of Heracles — the strait of Gibraltar — to found Gadir, the modern Cadiz, on the Atlantic face of Spain, where they raised a temple to Melqart at the gate of the ocean. Above all they founded Carthage, Qart-hadasht, the “new city,” on the bay of Tunis. The legend gave it a Tyrian princess, Elissa, whom the Romans called Dido, fleeing her brother’s treachery; the chronology, reckoned from Tyrian king-lists, set the founding around 814 BCE. From Tyre, then, came the power that would three centuries later contest the western sea with Rome.

Hiram, Solomon, and the oracle against Tyre

The Hebrew scriptures preserve Tyre at the height of this prosperity, seen from the hill country inland. In the tenth century BCE, in the books of Kings and Chronicles, King Hiram of Tyre stands as the indispensable ally of David and then of Solomon in Jerusalem. When Solomon set out to build the Temple, it was Hiram who sent down the cedar and cypress of the Lebanon range, floated as rafts along the coast, and dispatched the craftsmen who knew how to work stone and bronze and the precious woods — including a master artisan, himself named Hiram, set over the metalwork. In exchange Solomon sent up wheat and oil year by year (1 Kings 5). The arrangement is a clear window onto the real economy of the coast: the inland kingdom had grain and the seaboard city had timber, ships, and skilled hands. Josephus, citing the Tyrian annals through Menander, even synchronized the two reigns and fixed the Temple’s building to the twelfth year of Hiram.

The same scriptures preserve the city’s pride and its fall in another key. The prophet Ezekiel, writing in the sixth century BCE as Babylon pressed on the whole region, devoted three long chapters (Ezekiel 26–28) to an oracle against Tyre. He pictured the merchant city set “in the heart of the seas,” grown rich and arrogant on its trade, its ruler so swollen with wealth that he said in his heart, I am a god, I sit in the seat of gods, in the heart of the seas — and he foretold its scraping bare to the naked rock, a place where fishermen would spread their nets. The oracle is a poem of judgment on commercial pride, and it carries, in passing, one of the fullest catalogs that survives of what the city actually traded: silver, iron, tin, and lead; horses and mules; ivory and ebony; embroidered linen and the blue and purple cloth; wine and wool; the produce of a hundred ports passing across the Tyrian quays.

The seven months of Alexander

For all the prophecies, the rock held a long time. The Assyrians besieged it and could not take the island; the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar are said to have sat before it for thirteen years and won, at most, a negotiated submission. The water defended it. What no army from the land could do, one army finally did from the sea — by making land where there had been none.

In the winter of 332 BCE Alexander the Great came down the Phoenician coast, and the cities opened their gates to him one by one. Tyre offered submission but refused him entry to the island and to the temple of Melqart, where he meant to sacrifice to the god he called his ancestor Heracles. The refusal was the whole quarrel. Lacking a fleet strong enough to force the harbor, Alexander did the thing that turned the siege into a legend: he set his army to building a causeway — a mole — out from the mainland across the half-mile of water to the island walls. They tore down the houses of Old Tyre on the shore for rubble and felled the cedars of the mountains for piles, and pushed the road foot by foot into the sea. The Tyrians fought it the whole way, raining missiles from their walls, sending fire-ships against the works, sallying out in galleys. The siege ran some seven months, from the start of the year into the high summer. In the end Alexander gathered ships from the Phoenician and Cypriot cities now under his command, broke the Tyrian fleet, brought his engines up the completed mole and onto floating platforms, and stormed the walls. The reprisal was terrible: thousands of the defenders killed, many crucified along the shore, and the surviving population — by the ancient figures, some thirty thousand — sold into slavery.

The causeway did not wash away. Sand piled against it on both sides, and the mole silted into a permanent isthmus. The island became a peninsula, and it has stayed one ever since: the Tyre of today sits at the end of a tongue of land that is, at its core, the road Alexander built to kill it.

The Al-Bass archaeological zone at Tyre, on the landward approach the causeway created, where a Roman avenue ran between the necropolis and the hippodrome under a triumphal arch. Photograph by Roman Deckert, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Ruin, cathedral, and the open ground

Tyre survived its destruction; cities on good harbors usually do. Rebuilt and repopulated, it passed to the Seleucid heirs of Alexander and then, in 64 BCE, into the Roman world, where it kept its name for purple and made a comfortable provincial wealth. The most imposing ruins on the ground today are Roman and Byzantine, raised on the new land of the peninsula. In the Al-Bass quarter, along the avenue that the causeway’s silting had opened toward the mainland, stand the great necropolis — one of the largest cemeteries known from the region, hundreds of tombs and thousands of burials accumulated between the first and fourth centuries — a second-century triumphal arch, an aqueduct, and the hippodrome. The hippodrome is among the largest of the Roman world, near 480 meters long, its stone tiers built to seat tens of thousands who came to watch the chariots; only the Circus Maximus at Rome outdid it.

The city kept its standing into Christian late antiquity as a metropolitan see, and revived again under the Crusaders. After the armies of the First Crusade took the coast, Tyre became a stronghold of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and in 1127 work began on the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, raised on the foundations of a Byzantine church. Its most famous churchman was the chronicler William of Tyre, archbishop of the see in the 1170s and 1180s, whose history of the Crusader states is one of the great narratives of the medieval Levant; tradition long held — though the identification is uncertain — that the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, drowned on the Third Crusade, was buried in its choir. The cathedral fell with the Crusader kingdom, and the city sank slowly back into a fishing town, its ancient grandeur quarried away or buried under sand.

What the spade has brought back up since the twentieth century — the colonnaded streets, the arch, the racing-track, the ranked tombs, the broken purple-shells still heaped where the dye-yards stood — earned the site, in 1984, a place on the UNESCO World Heritage List, named for the city that ruled the seas and dyed the cloth of kings. The modern town of Sour goes on around and over it, on the spit of land that was once an island, with the line of Alexander’s mole running invisibly beneath its streets. The rock that named the place is still there, holding the sea off as it always did, only no longer surrounded by it.

→ Related: The Phoenicians · The Canaanites · Byblos · Sidon · Carthage · Tophet · Phoenician Religion · Baal · El God · Astarte Goddess · Asherah · Anat · Mot God · Ugaritic West Semitic Religion · Canaan · Ugarit · Old Testament · Dagon · The Egyptians · Ishtar