The National Museum of Beirut is the principal museum of archaeology in Lebanon. The collection begun after World War I, and the museum was officially opened in 1942. The museum has collections totaling about 100,000 objects, most of which are antiquities and medieval finds from excavations undertaken by the Directorate General of Antiquities.
The facade of the National Museum of Beirut
19th century engraving of the Kaiserswerth deaconesses building in Beirut
The Ship sarcophagus: a sarcophagus showing a Phoenician ship, Sidon, 2nd century CE
Tyre Phoenician necropolis stela
The Phoenician sanctuary of Kharayeb is a historic temple in the hinterland of Tyre, Southern Lebanon, that was excavated in three stages. In 1946, Maurice Chehab, head of Lebanon's Directorate General of Antiquities, led the first mission that revealed a Hellenistic period temple and thousands of clay figurines dating from the sixth-to-first centuries BC. Excavations in 1969 by Lebanese archaeologist Brahim Kaoukabani and in 2009 by the Government of Italy yielded evidence of cultic practices, and produced a detailed reconstruction of the sanctuary's architecture.
Illustrative reconstruction of the sanctuary
Figurines of the Iron Age from Kharayeb and Tyre, at the National Museum of Beirut
Figurines of the Hellenistic period (330–31 BC) from Kharayeb and Tyre, showcasing Greek influence, displayed at the Beirut Rafik Hariri International Airport
Terracotta figurine holding a duck from the Kharayeb sanctuary, in the collection of the National Museum of Beirut