“When adopting a plant based exclusive diet has been scientifically proven not only to stop the evolution of certain diseases but it can also reverse them. We then, have the moral responsibility to act upon and align our beliefs with our actions.”
Cannabis has long been illegally farmed in the fertile Bekaa Valley and government now hopes to turn it into a legal billion-dollar trade
Lebanese independence arrived on November 22, 1943, when France’s two-decade mandate formally ended and a new republic took its place. Weeks earlier, French authorities had arrested the president and key ministers, but protests and international pressure forced their release within a fortnight. The moment recognized a people whose communal life long predated any modern border.
Seljuk Empire founders Tughril and Chaghri Beg, two brothers from a nomadic Turkic clan near the Aral Sea, captured Merv and Nishapur in 1037 C.E. and built a state that eventually stretched from the Aegean to the Hindu Kush. Rather than dismantle Persian civilization, they governed through it — a pattern of cultural fusion that echoed across later Islamic empires.
Phoenician traders were plying the eastern Mediterranean from cities like Byblos, Tyre, and Sidon as early as 2750 B.C.E., exchanging cedar and purple dye for goods from Egypt and beyond. Around 1050 B.C.E., they refined a 22-letter alphabet that became the ancestor of Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew — the quiet root of nearly every script we read today.
Baalbek, in present-day Lebanon, took shape as a Phoenician religious center around 2900 B.C.E., though people had gathered at the site for thousands of years before. Its builders raised retaining wall stones weighing up to 300 tons, and left a nearby quarried block topping 900 tons. The methods behind that work still aren’t fully understood.
Beirut’s story begins more than 5,000 years ago, when people settled a small island where a river met the Mediterranean. By the 14th century B.C.E., its ruler was already trading letters with an Egyptian pharaoh. Beneath today’s streets lie layers from Phoenician, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman life — a rare continuous thread of urban human history.
Qaraoun culture tools, knapped from flint some 12,000 years ago in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley, stood out for their sheer heft — large, robust implements unlike the finer blades common elsewhere in the Neolithic Levant. Jesuit geologist Henri Fleisch gathered over 100 of them in a single afternoon in 1954, revealing one thread in the long story of how early communities shaped local tools for local lives.
The Neolithic Revolution began around 12,000 years ago, as small groups across Mesopotamia, East Asia, Africa, and later the Americas independently started planting crops and tending animals instead of following them. Archaeologists have identified at least 11 separate regions where this shift happened on its own. It was the quiet groundwork for villages, writing, and nearly every civilization that followed.
Ksar Akil, a limestone rock shelter northeast of Beirut, preserved nearly 24 meters of stacked human life reaching back at least 45,000 years. Among its layers: pierced shell beads, stone tools, and the remains of a child nicknamed Egbert, buried beneath cobbles roughly 40,000 years ago. A quiet window into how modern humans moved through the ancient Levant.
