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Beirut Counts Its Own Destructions in a Proverb, Not a Record

There is a Lebanese saying that Beirut has been destroyed seven times and rebuilt seven times, and that it will be destroyed an eighth time and rebuilt an eighth.

It is worth being precise about what that number is. It is folklore, not a historical count. Archaeologists and encyclopaedias who repeat it label it as such — a proverb about a city, not a tally. Nobody has ever produced the list.

What is documented is older and stranger. Beirut's history runs back more than 5,000 years. The name comes from the Canaanite be'erot, "wells" — the underground water table beneath the city, which residents still tap. The first written reference is from the 14th century BC, in the cuneiform Amarna letters, where a ruler of Biruta wrote to the pharaoh of Egypt.

Excavations downtown have found layers of Phoenician, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader and Ottoman city, stacked. A dig in 1994 established that one modern street, Souk Tawile, still runs along an ancient Greek and Roman line.

Under Rome, as Berytus, the city held the first school of law in recorded history. In its golden age it outranked the schools of Constantinople, Athens and Rome, and its professors helped draft the Justinian Code. Beirut was known as the Mother of Legislation.

The clock: which is worth holding in mind for what happened on 26 March 2023, when Lebanon woke up in two time zones at once.

Lebanon normally moves its clocks forward on the last Sunday in March, with Europe. On Thursday 23 March, caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati announced the change would be postponed to 20 April — after Ramadan — so that those fasting could break the fast around 6pm rather than 7pm.

The Maronite Church, the country's largest Christian institution, said it had not been consulted and would move its clocks forward regardless. Christian schools and organisations followed. So did the news channels LBCI and MTV. Muslim institutions largely stayed on winter time.

For roughly two days, a country 88 kilometres wide at its widest point was running on two different hours. People juggled work and school across both. Search engines returned different answers for the time in Lebanon. Middle East Airlines kept its clocks on winter time but moved every departure forward an hour to stay aligned with international schedules.

On 27 March the cabinet reversed the decision. Mikati said his intention had been to relieve those fasting "without causing any harm to any other Lebanese factions," and that some had given the decision "a dimension I had never imagined."

The city that taught the ancient world how to draft law spent a weekend in which a legal decree about the clock was simply declined by half the country.

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