Sidon District - Sidon (Paperback)

Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Sidon, or Sada, (Arabic:,; Phoenician:, ydwn; Greek: Latin: Hebrew:, n, Turkish: ) is the third-largest city in Lebanon. It is located in the South Governorate of Lebanon, on the Mediterranean coast, about 40 km (25 mi) north of Tyre and 40 km (25 mi) south of the capital Beirut. Its name means a fishery. It is a city of 200,000 inhabitants mainly of the Muslim Sunni, Shiite, and Christian Greek Catholic and Maronite. Persian style bull protome found in Saida gives testimony of the Aecheminid rule and influence. Marble, 5 century B.C.Sidon has been inhabited since 4000 BC and perhaps as early as Neolithic times (6000 - 4000 Be. It was one of the most important Phoenician cities, and may have been the oldest. From here, and other ports, a great Mediterranean commercial empire was founded. Homer praised the skill of its craftsmen in producing glass and purple dyes. It was also from here that a colonizing party went to found the city of Tyre. Tyre also grew into a great city, and in subsequent years there was competition between the two, each claiming to be the metropolis ('Mother City') of Phoenicia. Glass manufacturing, Sidon's most important enterprise in the Phoenician era, was conducted on a vast scale, and the production of purple dye was almost as important. The small shell of the Murex trunculus was broken in order to extract the pigment that was so rare it became the mark of royalty. In AD 1855, the sarcophagus of King Eshmunazar II was discovered. From a Phoenician inscription on its lid, it appears that he was a "king of the Sidonians," probably in the 5th century BC, and that his mother was a priestess of Ashtart, "the goddess of the Sidonians." In this inscription the gods Eshmun and Baal Sidon 'Lord of Sidon' (who may or m... More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=28366