The capital of Baalbek-Hermel Governorate, Baalbek has a population of approximately 82,608, mostly Shia Muslims, followed by Sunni Muslims and a minority of Christians. It is home to the annual Baalbeck International Festival.
A few miles from the swamp from which the Litani (the classical Leontes) and the Asi (the upper Orontes) flow, Baalbek may be the same as the mbk nhrm ("Source of the Two Rivers"), the abode of El in the Ugaritic Baal Cycle discovered in the 1920s and a separate serpent incantation.
Heliopolis is the latinisation of the Greek Hēlioúpolis , meaning "Sun City" in reference to the solar cult there. It is the earlier attested of the two names, appearing under the Seleucids and Ptolemies. Ammianus Marcellinus, however, does note that earlier "Assyrian" names of Levantine towns continued to be used alongside the official Greek ones imposed by the successors of Alexander. In Greek religion, Helios was both the sun in the sky and its personification as a god. The local Semitic god Baʿal Haddu was more often equated with Zeus or Jupiter or simply called the "Great God of Heliopolis",but the name may refer to the Egyptians' association of Baʿal with their great god Ra. It was sometimes described as Heliopolis in Syria or Coelesyria (Latin: Heliopolis Syriaca or Syriae) to distinguish it from its namesake in Egypt. In Catholicism, its titular see is distinguished as Heliopolis in Phoenicia, from its former Roman province Phoenice. The importance of the solar cult is also attested in the name Biḳāʿ al-ʿAzīz borne by the plateau surrounding Baalbek, as it references an earlier solar deity and not later men, named Aziz. In Greek and Roman antiquity, it was known as Heliopolis. It still possesses some of the best-preserved Roman ruins in Lebanon, including one of the largest temples of the empire. The gods that were worshipped there (Jupiter, Venus, and Bacchus) were equivalents of the Canaanite deities Hadad, Atargatis. Local influences are seen in the planning and layout of the temples, as they vary from the classic Roman design.
The name bʿlbk is first attested in the Mishnah, a second-century rabbinic text, as a geographic epithet for a kind of garlic, shum ba'albeki .Two early 5th-century Syriac manuscripts, a c. 411 translation of Eusebius's Theophania and a c. 435 life of Rabbula, bishop of Edessa. It was pronounced as Baʿlabakka or Baʿlabakku in Classical Arabic. In Modern Standard Arabic, its vowels are marked as Baʿlabak or Baʿlabekk or Bʿalbik, the latter of which is pronounced in Lebanese Arabic.The half ring or apostrophe in these romanisations marks the word's pharyngeal stop.
The etymology of Baalbek has been debated indecisively since the 18th century.Cook took it to mean "Baʿal (Lord) of the Beka"and Donne as "City of the Sun". Lendering asserts that it is probably a contraction of Baʿal Nebeq ("Lord of the Source" of the Litani River). Steiner proposes a Semitic adaption of "Lord Bacchus", from the classical temple complex.
On the basis of its similar name, several 19th-century Biblical archaeologists attempted to connect Baalbek to the "Baalgad" mentioned in the Hebrew Scripture's Book of Joshua, the Baalath listed among Solomon's cities in the First Book of Kings,the Baal-hamon where he had a vineyard, and the "Plain of Aven" in Amos.
Middle Ages
The ruins of a Baalbek mosque c. 1900
The probable remains of a medieval mosque in front of some of the Mamluk fortifications
Baalbek was occupied by the Muslim army in ad 634 (ah 13), in 636, or under Abu ʿUbaidah following the Byzantine defeat at Yarmouk in 637 (ah 16), either peacefully and by agreement[19] or following a heroic defense and yielding 2,000 oz (57 kg) of gold, 4,000 oz (110 kg) of silver, 2000 silk vests, and 1000 swords.The ruined temple complex was fortified under the name al-Qala‘ (lit. "The Fortress") but was sacked with great violence by the Damascene caliph Marwan II in 748, at which time it was dismantled and largely depopulated. It formed part of the district of Damascus under the Umayyads and Abbasids before being conquered by Fatimid Egypt in 942. In the mid-10th century, it was said to have "gates of palaces sculptured in marble and lofty columns also of marble" and that it was the most "stupendous" and "considerable" location in the whole of Syria.It was sacked and razed by the Byzantines under John I in 974, raided by Basil II in 1000, and occupied by Salih ibn Mirdas, emir of Aleppo, in 1025.
Early modernity
In 1516, Baalbek was conquered with the rest of Syria by the Ottoman sultan Selim the Grim. In recognition of their prominence among the Shiites of the Beqaa Valley, the Ottomans awarded the sanjak of Homs and local iltizam concessions to Baalbek's Harfush family.Like the Hamadas, the Harfush emirs were involved on more than one occasion in the selection of Church officials and the running of local monasteries.
Tradition holds that many Christians quit the Baalbek region in the eighteenth century for the newer, more secure town of Zahlé on account of the Harfushes’ oppression and rapacity, but more critical studies have questioned this interpretation, pointing out that the Harfushes were closely allied to the Orthodox Ma‘luf family of Zahlé (where indeed Mustafa Harfush took refuge some years later) and showing that depredations from various quarters as well as Zahlé’s growing commercial attractiveness accounted for Baalbek’s decline in the eighteenth century.What repression there was did not always target the Christian community per se. The Shiite ‘Usayran family, for example, is also said to have left Baalbek in this period to avoid expropriation by the Harfushes, establishing itself as one of the premier commercial households of Sidon and later even serving as consuls of Iran.
From the 16th century, European tourists began to visit the colossal and picturesque ruins. Donne hyperbolised "No ruins of antiquity have attracted more attention than those of Heliopolis, or been more frequently or accurately measured and described."Misunderstanding the temple of Bacchus as the "Temple of the Sun", they considered it the best-preserved Roman temple in the world. The Englishman Robert Wood's 1757 Ruins of Balbec included carefully measured engravings that proved influential on British and Continental Neoclassical architects. For example, details of the Temple of Bacchus's ceiling inspired a bed and ceiling by Robert Adam and its portico inspired that of St George's in Bloomsbury.
During the 18th century, the western approaches were covered with attractive groves of walnut trees, but the town itself suffered badly during the 1759 earthquakes, after which it was held by the Metawali, who again feuded with other Lebanese tribes.Their power was broken by Jezzar Pasha, the rebel governor of Acre, in the last half of the 18th century. All the same, Baalbek remained no destination for a traveller unaccompanied by an armed guard.Upon the pasha's death in 1804, chaos ensued until Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt occupied the area in 1831, after which it again passed into the hands of the Harfushes. In 1835, the town's population was barely 200 people. In 1850, the Ottomans finally began direct administration of the area, making Baalbek a kaza under the Damascus Eyalet and its governor a kaymakam.
Excavations
The largest stone at Baalbek, uncovered in 2014
Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany and his wife passed through Baalbek on November 1, 1898, on his way to Jerusalem. He noted both the magnificence of the Roman remains and the drab condition of the modern settlement. It was expected at the time that natural disasters, winter frosts, and the raiding of building materials by the city's residents would shortly ruin the remaining ruins.The archaeological team he dispatched began work within a month. Despite finding nothing they could date prior to Baalbek's Roman occupation,Puchstein and his associates worked until 1904 and produced a meticulously researched and thoroughly illustrated series of volumes. Later excavations under the Roman flagstones in the Great Court unearthed three skeletons and a fragment of Persian pottery dated to the 6th–4th centuries bc. The sherd featured cuneiform letters. In 1977, Jean-Pierre Adam made a brief study suggesting most of the large blocks could have been moved on rollers with machines using capstans and pulley blocks, a process which he theorised could use 512 workers to move a 557 tonnes (614 tons). "Baalbek, with its colossal structures, is one of the finest examples of Imperial Roman architecture at its apogee", UNESCO reported in making Baalbek a World Heritage Site in 1984. When the committee inscribed the site, it expressed the wish that the protected area include the entire town within the Arab walls, as well as the southwestern extramural quarter between Bastan-al-Khan, the Roman site and the Mameluk mosque of Ras-al-Ain. Lebanon's representative gave assurances that the committee's wish would be honoured. Recent cleaning operations at the Temple of Jupiter discovered the deep trench at its edge, whose study pushed back the date of Tell Baalbek's settlement to the PPNB Neolithic. Finds included pottery sherds including a spout dating to the early Bronze Age. In the summer of 2014, a team from the German Archaeological Institute led by Jeanine Abdul Massih of the Lebanese University discovered a sixth, much larger stone suggested to be the world's largest ancient block. The stone was found underneath and next to the Stone of the Pregnant Woman and measures around 19.6 m × 6 m × 5.5 m (64 ft × 20 ft × 18 ft). It is estimated to weigh 1,650 tonnes (1,820 tons).