Sunday, December 14, 2008

Tyre

Map of Lebanon from the CIA Factbook. Tyre is near the southern border.Tyre, from Strong's H6865 Hebrew: צור Tsor or Tzor = "a rock."

Tyre is a city in the South Governorate of Lebanon. With 117,100 inhabitants (it is reported only 10% of the population is left because of the Israel-Lebanon conflict), Tyre juts out from the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, about 23 miles north of Acre, and 20 miles south of Sidon.

"The location of the city of Tyre is not in doubt, for it exists to this day on the same spot and is known as Sur." [Virtual map of Tyre/Sur, Lebanan] (Katzenstein, H.J., The History of Tyre, 1973, p9)

Tyre originally consisted of two distinct urban centers, one on an island and the other on the adjacent coast (approximately 30 stadia apart or 3.5 miles according to Strabo in his Geography xvi, 2), before Alexander the Great connected the island to the coast during his siege of the city. One was a heavily fortified island city amidst the sea and the latter, originally called Ushu (later, Palaetyrus, by the Greeks) was actually more like a line of suburbs than any one city and was used primarily as a source of water and timber for the main island city. Flavius Josephus even records them fighting against each other, although most of the time they supported one another due to the island city’s wealth from maritime trade and the mainland area’s source of timber, water and burial grounds.

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