Baalbek

Less than a kilometre from the temples at Baalbek there is a hillside quarry with stones in it that nobody ever collected. The famous one has been known locally for centuries and weighs somewhere around a thousand tonnes. In the 1990s a heavier one turned up beside it. Then in 2014 a German team uncovered a third: roughly nineteen and a half metres long, and estimated at more than sixteen hundred tonnes. It is the largest worked block known from the ancient world.

It never left. One face is still joined to the bedrock it was cut from, and the chisel marks along the sides are as fresh as the day the crew stopped. Nobody knows why they stopped. A flaw may have shown up in the stone, or the building programme may have changed under them. The most ambitious object anyone in antiquity attempted has been waiting to be picked up for two thousand years.

Baal's Town, Then The Sun's

Baalbek existed long before Rome arrived. The mound underneath has occupation layers going back to the Bronze Age, and the name is usually traced to the Semitic god Baal. The Greek-speaking world knew the place as Heliopolis, the city of the sun.

Rome settled army veterans here under Augustus and made it a colony. What happened next is genuinely hard to explain. The empire chose a valley more than a thousand metres up, well off the main roads, and started building one of the largest temple complexes anywhere inside its borders. Construction ran for more than two centuries and was never entirely finished. The temple of Jupiter was ringed by fifty-four columns about twenty metres tall. For parts of the surrounding courtyard, monolithic granite shafts were brought from Aswan in Egypt, which means stone was cut on the upper Nile, shipped across the sea and hauled eighty kilometres inland for a sanctuary in the Beqaa.

The retaining wall on the temple's west side carries three blocks laid end to end, each about nineteen metres long and in the region of eight hundred tonnes. They are not resting on the ground. Beneath them sit courses of other blocks, themselves hundreds of tonnes each, so the three are perched several metres up.

No crane did this. The blocks were never lifted; they were dragged sideways. The quarry sits slightly higher than the site, so the stones came down a gentle slope on rollers, pulled by heavy cable running through pulleys to banks of capstans, with what must have been hundreds of people turning them at once. The joints between the three are still tight enough to be awkward to get a blade into.

What The Earthquakes Left

Six of Jupiter's fifty-four columns are still standing. Earthquakes took the rest. The region sits on an active fault, and the sanctuary has been shaken hard several times; a major eighteenth-century earthquake in the Beqaa brought down three of the nine that were still upright at the time. The remaining six, with a section of entablature still bridging their tops, are the most photographed skyline in Lebanon.

The building next door, conventionally called the temple of Bacchus, is almost intact. It is smaller than Jupiter's and it is one of the best preserved Roman temples anywhere, with its ceiling, doorway and colonnade still in place. Even the name is a guess. Modern visitors saw vine and grape reliefs and settled on Bacchus; no ancient source says who it was for.

Changing Hands

At the end of the fourth century a basilica went up inside Jupiter's great court, built from the temple's own stone. Later, under Arab rule, the complex was put to a different use again: the terrace walls became ramparts and the temple platform became a keep. The medieval towers and battlements around the edge date from then, which is why the site was known locally for centuries simply as the citadel.

One more thing worth knowing. In 1898 the German emperor Wilhelm II passed through on his way to Jerusalem, was sufficiently impressed, and sent an archaeological mission back a couple of years later. Most of what we understand about the plan of Baalbek comes from those few seasons of work.

Now

Baalbek has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1984. A music festival has been staged among the ruins since 1956, with the stage set at the foot of the six columns; it stopped for years during the civil war and then came back.

Most of the threats do not come from the building itself, though damp and salt in the stone are slowly eating the reliefs. The real fragility is regional: during the fighting in the surrounding area in 2024, UNESCO placed the site under provisional enhanced protection. These stones have not moved in two thousand years, and almost everything that has happened to them in the last century happened because of events a few kilometres away.