Lebanon

Lebanon takes its name from an old Semitic word for white, after the snow on its peaks. Mount Lebanon rises almost straight from a narrow coastal strip, cut by gorges such as the Qadisha Valley, where monks lived in caves and a grove of the cedars on the flag survives. Beyond the crest opens the Beqaa Valley, a farming plain watered by the Litani and the Orontes, and beyond it the drier Anti-Lebanon range.

Byblos, Sidon and Tyre were Phoenician ports whose merchants carried cedar, glass and purple dye across the Mediterranean and spread an alphabet from which Greek and Latin letters descend. Rome raised colossal temples at Baalbek. Maronites and Druze made the mountains a refuge, and Mount Lebanon won autonomy under the Ottomans in 1861. France created Greater Lebanon in 1920, and on independence in 1943 an unwritten pact shared the top offices among religious communities. Civil war tore the country apart from 1975 to 1990.

Khalil Gibran, born in Bsharri, wrote The Prophet in New York, and the voice of Fairuz has opened mornings on Arab radio for generations. A meal starts with mezze: hummus, smoky moutabal, tabbouleh heavy with parsley and kibbeh of lamb and cracked wheat, with arak clouding as water is added. Weddings end in lines of dabke dancers. Traders, bankers and emigrants sending money home have long carried the economy, and the Beqaa grows potatoes and grapes for wineries such as Ksara.