Lebanon is a mountainous country in the Levant with a coastline on the eastern Mediterranean Sea; it borders Israel in the south and Syria in the north. The Anti-Lebanon mountain range forms long stretches of the border between Lebanon and Syria in the east. As the smallest nation on the Asian mainland, it covers an area of 10,452 km² ─ about one-third the size of Belgium or about one-third the size of the US state of Maryland. Lebanon has a population of 6.1 million people (2019), including approximately 1.5 million refugees from Syria and Palestine. The Capital Beirut is a city of unique beauty whose character blends the sophisticated and cosmopolitan with the provincial and parochial. Though Lebanon, particularly its coastal region, was the site of some of the oldest human settlements in the world—the Phoenician ports of Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos were dominant centers of trade and culture in the 3rd millennium BCE—it was not until 1920 that the contemporary state came into being. In that year France, which administered Lebanon as a League of Nations mandate, established the state of Greater Lebanon. Lebanon then became a republic in 1926 and achieved independence in 1943.