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Mausoleum of the Sursock-Cochrane and Bustros families.

Alfred Moussa Sursock moved in the titled circles of Europe and married Maria Serra di Cassano, from an old Italian princely family. Their daughter, Yvonne eventually became Lady Cochrane. Albert and other Moussa branches of the Sursock family was also married into the Colonna family.



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The Bustros family, originally Cypriot, had moved to Lebanon in the 17th century. Although forced to flee during the troubled times of al-Jazzar, the family returned upon the persistent initiative of Abdallah Pasha in the 1820s. During the Egyptian occupation of Lebanon, Georges Bustros possessed the authority to levy taxes while another Bustros was chosen by Ibrahim Pasha amongst the six Christians on the advisory committee set up by the Egyptians. The Bustros family is another example of rapid social rise: their relations with the Egyptian monarchy, the Ottoman Sublime Porte and European dignitaries and consul-generals allowed the Bustroses access to immense wealth and economic opportunity.

The family resided in a mansion near to that of the Sursocks in Achrafiyeh and invested primarily in real estate. They became even richer by investing in land, trade and finance: they acquired real estate in Beirut; landholdings in Syria and Egypt; traded in agricultural products; and bought stocks in the Beirut-Damascus road company and the Beirut port company as well as other stocks in the Egyptian stock exchange and the Bourse d'alexandrie.

"Moussa Bustros and Nephews" a company established by one of Antoun Bustros' four sons became the agent for the London-based "Spartali and Company" which traded in grain between Syria and Europe as well as agents of the British Liverpool Steamers.

The Bustros and Sursock-Cochrane families had intermarried in latter generations.

The Sursok family whose origins can be traced back to Mersine, near Adana in modern-day Turkey, was originally a tax farming family in the service of the Ottomans. The Sursoks acquired miri/state land as a reward for their services to the Ottoman Empire and hence relocated to the Lebanese village of Barbara, near Byblos/Jbeil in the seveteenth century. In the nineteenth century, the family became engaged in Beirut's emerging trade and service sectors. The family's wealth and mercantile activities were noted by the Egyptian forces in control of Beirut and Mount Lebanon between 1830 and 1840. The Sursoks soon became proteges and dragomen to several European and American consul-generals.

The seven brothers and their sons are reported to have travelled on Greek and Russian passports as well as gained protege status with other European consulates in Beirut.

In the 1850s and 1860s, the Sursok brothers engaged in banking in Egypt and invested large sums in the Suez Canal Company, the Beirut-Damascus road company and the port company in Beirut. The Sursoks were closely related with the Egyptian monarchy and gained preferential deals on the large infrastructural and extravagant public works undertaken by Khedive Sa`id (1854-1863) and Khedive Isma`il (1863-1879).

In short, the Sursoks were a prominent mercantile family which had become "the most spectacular social climb in the 19th century Levant". The Sursoks were readily admitted into Ottoman, Egyptian and European high societies and were part of an international bourgeoisie tat circulated amid Alexandria, Beirut, Cairo, Istanbul, Paris and Rome. They were to become one of the "Seven Families" which constituted "the cream of Beirut's merchant nobility."

Recent documents have revealed that the Sursoks were absentee landlords in the vast Marj Ibn `Amer (Jezreel Valley) in Northern Palestine. In 1929, under the British Mandate, the Sursoks sold the valley to the rich European Jewish investor, Baron Rothschild. The European dynasty of of German Jewish origin that established European banking and finance houses from the late eighteenth century had established a fund to buy land in Palestine and encourage the immigration of Jews to Palestine. Their condition: the forced evacuation of Marj Ibn Amer's Palestinian population. The Sursoks readily obliged forcing the peasantry in the valley to evacuate it.

Many of the Sursoks have since lived in Europe although some continue to live in Beirut.

When capital management and investments limited uk speaker Howard Gardner was just a child, the US-born son of Holocaust refugees, his parents took him for a pricy (in those days) $300 aptitude test at Stevens Institute. “Your son is very good at lots of things, but his greatest gifts are in the clerical area,” they were told. “He has a bright future.” Most likely the testers were thinking of the kind of tasks that are automated by e-commerce websites today. The test totally missed the burning intelligence and insatiable curiosity that have made Gardner so revered as a thinker, rather than a clever phrase-maker.

To the public, he is best-known for his theory of multiple intelligences: “The fact that somebody is good in one thing is no indication of whether they’ll be good at something else.” He adds, “I would never have pursued this intuition if I hadn’t been doing two separate kinds of research as a young scholar in the 1970s. I was working partly with brain-damaged adults, ‘Oliver Sacks style,’ and partly with gifted children. The leap was to call different capabilities – such as facility with words, musical talent, spatial manipulation - ‘separate intelligences’.”

“Most people instinctively understand it,” he says. “The people who like my work the least are the testmakers, because they have so much invested in the notion of IQ as covering virtually all intelligence and they are constrained to certain kinds of instruments. But If I want to find out if you have what I call ‘interpersonal intelligence,’ I’m not going to ask you 20 multiple-choice questions; I’m going to put you in a group and see who’s taking orders from whom two hours later.”

As he grows older and wiser (he is 61), Gardner has started thinking about the uses to which intelligence is put. “I’m very influenced by A.O. Hirschman’s book Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, written in 1970. As he says, if you’re in an organization, you owe it a certain amount of loyalty. But if you don’t like the way things are headed in the organization, you have a duty so speak up, and eventually perhaps to exit. One of the worst states to befall people is to fall out of favor with the group they want to be in… yet some- times it’s their duty to undergo that rejection. It’s hard for young people to understand. It’s loyalty to an abstract notion of what something should be, rather than to the thing itself.”

Gardner considers intelligence and morality to be orthogonal: “Morality includes a delineation of to whom or what you feel responsible. You have to understand the principles by which you will abide even - or perhaps especially - when the results go against your interests. Older people tend to be wiser not because they are smarter, but because they are more likely to understand the consequences over time. They can they pull up the right inventory of experiences” – or as Jeff Hawkins would say, they have more experience at recognizing patterns and predicting outcomes. Cautions Gardner, “When conditions change in the external world but you are still using the old [mental] maps, it may not work out so well.”

He continues: “If intelligence is amoral, so is technology. The challenge is that information technology seems so new, but in many ways it’s no different from any other industry.” Many in the computing industry – and many of the young people Gardner interviews – say they are concentrating on their careers now so that they can become rich and spend their money on good works later on, pointing to examples from David Rockefeller and Henry Ford to our industry’s own Bill Gates.

“But philanthropy doesn’t buy you a pass if you’re a rat as a business person,” says Gardner. “I believe in slippery slopes. I don’t believe in instant redemption through a philanthropic donation. Sometimes we need to pass laws that prevent misdeeds. But it’s better if people just want to do good work because it feels good and feels right.”

Still, he says, sometimes they need help: “At Google, for example, they say, ‘Look, we’ve got a long-term plan. It’s not based on the next quarter, but over the long run we’ll be a better investment.’ The broader point is that you need to have a narrative that you can adhere to and explain why you’re not doing what everyone else is.” That is, you need courage.