An island city off the coast of Lebanon
Tyre, in modern southern Lebanon, began as a settlement on a rocky island very close to the mainland, with a second settlement on the shore opposite. The Greek name Tyros and the Phoenician name Sur are both thought to be connected with a word for rock. The island’s position gave Tyre two advantages that shaped its history: sheltered harbours for ships, and a natural defence against land armies, who had to cross open water to reach it.
Ancient writers describe two main harbours, one facing north toward Sidon, the other on the south side, sometimes called the Egyptian harbour. The city had also, in some periods, a strong sea wall. Its density was legendary. Writers mention tall buildings and a crowded island, and the city is described as a place where space was precious. The narrow channel separating it from the land was later filled in. After the siege by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, the causeway his army built silted up over centuries, and the old island became a peninsula, which is why modern Tyre is no longer surrounded by water.
A trading city among the Phoenician city-states
Tyre was one of several Phoenician city-states along the Levantine coast, alongside Sidon, Byblos and Arwad. Each was largely independent. Tyre’s fortunes grew in the early first millennium BCE, once the older powers of the Late Bronze Age had weakened and Mediterranean trade was reorganised. Merchants from Tyre dealt in timber, metalwork, glass and textiles, including cloth coloured with Tyrian purple dye, the city’s best-known product. The prophet Ezekiel, in a later chapter of the Bible, compares Tyre to a magnificent ship and lists the many places that traded with it, a vivid if rhetorical picture of its commercial reach.
From Tyre, settlers and traders moved west, founding or developing colonies in Cyprus, North Africa, Sicily and Iberia, in the movement usually called Phoenician colonization. Utica and Gadir (modern Cadiz) are among the sites traditionally linked to the city, and Carthage was its most famous offspring.
Hiram and the temple at Jerusalem
The best-known Tyrian king is Hiram I, who ruled in the tenth century BCE according to traditional chronology. The dates are approximate, and scholars debate how closely the biblical and later Tyrian sources can be reconciled. Hiram appears in the First Book of Kings and in Chronicles as a friend of David and Solomon, the kings of Israel.
According to these books, Hiram supplied cedar and cypress timber from Lebanon, along with skilled workers, for Solomon’s building projects, including the temple in Jerusalem. Solomon is said to have paid with wheat and olive oil. The text also describes a skilled craftsman from Tyre who worked on the temple’s bronze fittings. Later, Solomon is said to have given Hiram a group of towns in Galilee, which Hiram found unsatisfying.
What can be said with caution? The exchange fits what is known of the period: Lebanese timber was prized across the ancient Near East, and Tyre had the ships and the labour to export it. But the biblical account is a religious text composed later, and no inscription from the time confirms the arrangement. The temple itself has not been excavated, so historians treat the details as tradition. Hiram himself is also mentioned by the Jewish historian Josephus, who quotes earlier Greek writers on Tyre, but that testimony comes centuries later too.
Hiram’s city
Later tradition credits Hiram with major works in Tyre itself. Josephus, citing a Greek author, says that he joined smaller islets into one larger site by filling in the ground between them and that he built or restored temples, including one to Melqart, the city’s principal god. The same sources refer to a festival of Melqart in which the god was said to be “raised up”, and the god remained central to Tyre and its colonies, including Carthage. Because these accounts are late, they should be read as a tradition about the king’s reputation as a builder, not as a record of precise works.
Pressure from empires
The wealth of Tyre drew the attention of powerful neighbours. In the ninth and following centuries the Assyrian Empire demanded tribute from the Phoenician cities. Tyre sometimes paid, sometimes resisted, and its island position helped it endure sieges that other places could not. The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II is reported to have besieged it for a long time in the sixth century BCE, and the outcome was a negotiated arrangement rather than a destruction, so far as the evidence tells us. Persian rule followed, and then the more dramatic siege by Alexander.
What this tells us
Tyre shows how a small state with limited farmland could become important through seafaring, craftsmanship and diplomacy. Its relationship with Hiram’s neighbours was commercial first, and the city’s influence spread far beyond its walls. The remains visible there today are mostly from later Roman and Byzantine eras, which are described in a separate article on the surviving architecture.