#berytus

[scurra-vagus-blog]

In 140 BC the Phoenician village called "Biruta" was destroyed by Diodotus Tryphon in his contest with Antiochus VII Sidetes for the throne of the Macedonian Seleucid monarchy. Later it was soon rebuilt on a more conventional Hellenistic plan and renamed Laodicea in Phoenicia (Greek: Λαοδίκεια ἡ ἐν Φοινίκῃ) or Laodicea in Canaan in honor of a Seleucid Laodice. The city was conquered by the Romans of Pompey in 64 BC and renamed "Berytus", as a reference to the name of the old original phoenician port-village. The city was assimilated into the Roman Empire, veteran soldiers were sent there, and large building projects were undertaken. Berytus was considered the most Roman city in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire.[5] It was one of four Roman colonies in the Syria-Phoenicia region and the only one with full Ius Italicum (meaning: exemption from imperial taxation). Its territory under Claudius reached the Bekaa valley and included Heliopolis: it was the only area mostly latin-speaking in the Syria-Phoenicia region, because settled by Roman colonists who even promoted agriculture in the fertile lands around actual Yammoune. From the 1st century BC the Bekaa valley served as a source of grain for the Roman provinces of the Levant and even for the same Rome (today the valley makes up to 40 percent of Lebanon's arable land):Roman colonists created there even a "country district" called Pagus Augustus. PHOENICIA, Berytus. Elagabalus. AD 218-222. Æ (30mm, 24.03 g, 6h). Laureate and cuirassed bust right / Tyche-Astarte standing facing, with left foot on prow, holding stylis in right hand; to right, Nike on short column, crowning her; all with tetrastyle temple. Sawaya – (but obv. die D340). Good Fine, dusty green patina. An apparently rare obverse die with bust seen from front, which Sawaya only knew of from one coin (his no. 1705). That coin features a more ornate temple with sculptural acroteria along the roofline and Cupids riding dolphins to either side of the steps.

[aksnameh]

Berytus: An Underground City

I'm really excited this is finally coming out in English

"

Berytus: An Underground City, scheduled to be published in English next year, also in Kareem James Abu-Zeid’s translation, seems inspired by the archeologists’ discovery of multiple Beiruts beneath the real one. It begins with a self-consciously gothic premise: Jaber is dining one night with friends downtown when they are approached by a man whom he recognizes as a former security guard from the al-Hayat offices, but who now “looks uncertain of his own existence” and begs the novelist to listen to his story. The guard claims to have fallen into a hole while working at the old City Palace cinema, an especially haunted spot in Jaber’s imagination, and to have landed in an underground city that lies beneath the more familiar one. The rest of the novel reads like an exotic travelogue—it includes a romance that seems to have strayed from a work by the turn-of-the-century French novelist Pierre Loti—whose pleasure lies in Jaber’s ingenuity in making this alternate world anthropologically plausible. What do these cave dwellers eat? What do they use for money? How do they procure light? Underground Beirut turns out to be a funhouse version of the actual city: the food is terrible and the inhabitants have forgotten about religion, but both are cities of emigrants with dreams of a better life elsewhere. Here again, Jaber’s fiction seems designed to remind us of the precarious nature of the world we take to be natural and even inevitable. One look into a Phoenician dig pit suggests otherwise.

At one point in Berytus, the security guard-turned-storyteller offers Jaber a riddling summation of the novelist’s own method. “What is it you’re always saying in your books? That whatever happens was written.” “Written,” maktoub: the Arabic involves a pun Jaber is especially fond of. On the surface, the phrase uses a conventional expression for fate, and means that whatever happens was bound to happen. This is precisely what Jaber does not say in his books, of course, though it is easy to see how his interest in historical documentation might lead unwary readers astray. Instead, his fiction makes a more subtle argument: not that whatever happens is fated (maktoub), but that whatever happens is recorded (maktoub) somewhere, and might therefore be rescued from the catastrophe of actual history. It is an especially appealing thought, given Lebanon’s still unreconciled past and conflict-ridden present."

-Robyn Creswell

[the7exclusivejournal]

TONY YAACOUB : COLLECTION COUTURE PRINTEMPS ETE 2014.

La collection Couture Printemps Eté 2014 de Tony Yaacoub est dédiée à l’esprit de Berytus, princesse de légende à qui, jadis, son père offrit Beyrouth, l’étincelante.