Archaeology Magazine - July/August 1996 - 103

The

Price

Progress

How
policies
the

government

short-sighted

development

favored
expense
By Albert

archaeology

F.H. Naccache

November 1994 the Lebanese press has
reported, on a nearly weekly basis, the wrecking of mosaics, walls, columns, and other archaeological monuments in Beirut. Working
around the clock for more than a year, bullSince
dozers dug into the city, filling dump trucks that promptly emptied their loads into the Mediterranean Sea. So far
more than 7 million cubic feet of ancient Beirut have
been lost forever. What follows is the story of how I saw
the disaster unfold.
Beirut's cultural heritage was well-documented by the
early 1970s. Its oldest excavated artifact was a 500,000year-old Acheulean hand ax, found in 1946 less than one
and one-half miles from the downtown; 29 Palaeolithic
sites had been discovered in the area. Surface collection
had yielded stone tools characteristic of the Natufian culture at the end of the Palaeolithic, and Neolithic pottery
and tools had been found in a tell destroyed in 1948.
The late Roger Saidah of the Lebanese Department of
Antiquities, while conducting a preliminary survey in the
downtown area in 1969, had made promising Neolithic
and Bronze Age surface finds. Beirut was known to have
been an important trade center, on par with the coastal
cities of Byblos and Ugarit, from the eighteenth century
B.C. to the end of the Bronze Age. Although little was
known of the city from the twelfth through seventh centuries B.C., it had again become a center of some importance by the sixth century B.c. The city flourished during
the Roman and Early Byzantine empires, when it was
known as Berytus, until devastated by an earthquake in
A.D. 551. Less was known about Beirut during the early
days of the Islamic Caliphate (650-900). The city eventually recovered from the earthquake, to be three times besieged, destroyed, and rebuilt during the Crusades of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries. During the Mamluk period (fourteenth through sixteenth centuries), Beirut's

July/August

1996

economy again thrived, and at the beginning of the seventeenth century the city experienced a brief flash of
prosperity under Emir Fakhreddin, who attempted to establish an independent Lebanon. The Ottomans crushed
Fakhreddin and destroyed much of Beirut. A phoenix
many times reborn from its ashes, Beirut was known to
be one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the
world, and from at least the eighteenth century B.C. to
the eighteenth century A.D. it existed within the perimeter of its modern downtown.
Over the years a number of ceasefires have punctuated the fighting in Lebanon. Following the first, in 1977,
there was much talk of reconstructing the downtown,
and the Department of Antiquities began many exploratory excavations. In a 1978 report, HeritagePreservation and Contributionto the Elaborationof the Master Plan of
Beirut, UNESCO's Yves Barbier concluded that Beirut's
heritage "is the root of its urban blossoming, the link between the people and their city; taking this into account
could be the starting point for the new urban plan." Unfortunately the fighting resumed. A second false peace
followed Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Again, there
was talk of reconstruction. Lebanese-born Rafie Hariri,
who made a multibillion-dollar fortune in large construction projects for the Saudi royal family in the mid-1970s,
now offered the services of his bulldozers to clean up the
city. Barricades were torn down, roads linking the two
sides of the city were reopened, even the facades of some
downtown buildings were restored. The same bulldozers
also brought down the buildings of old souks, or markets,
still standing east and west of the main downtown plaza,
known as Martyrs' Square in honor of those who rebelled against the Ottomans in 1915.
By October 1990, when the fighting again stopped,
Hariri was ready to press ahead with his plan for Beirut's
downtown. By then he wielded considerable influence
with Parliament. In January 1991 his assistant Fadl Chalak was put in charge of the Council for Development
and Reconstruction (CDR), a kind of superministry. The
CDR immediately bypassed the state apparatus and contracted with a private Lebanese engineering firm, Dar alHandasa, to create a Master Plan for the redevelopment
of the downtown. With direct funding from Hariri, an
army of lawyers, engineers, architects, promoters, and
managers was put to work on what would later be described as "the largest urban redevelopment project of
the 1990s." In the summer of 1991, the Master Plan was
unveiled by Henri Eddé, an elderly architect who headed
the Dar al-Handasa team. Astonishingly Eddé's plan did
not take into account the exceptional archaeological
wealth of the downtown. In flagrant violation of the
Lebanese Antiquity Law, which is clear on the obligation
of developers to preserve and study known archaeological
sites, Eddé's plan singled out only two percent of downtown- 23,920 out of nearly 1.2 million square yards- as
being worthy of archaeological excavation.
Leila Badr, the curator of the museum at the American University of Beirut, and I tried to get fellow histori-

Archaeology Magazine - July/August 1996

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