Baalbek, in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley near the sources of the Litani and Orontes rivers, has been inhabited for eight to nine thousand years as an oasis on caravan routes from Tyre to Palmyra. Its Canaanite triad of Baal, Astarte, and Adon was absorbed after Alexander the Great’s conquest in the 330s BC, when the city became Heliopolis, and later by Rome, which merged Baal-Hadad with Helios and Jupiter. Starting in the first century BC, Rome spent centuries building one of the largest sanctuaries in the Western world. Jean-Pierre Adam estimated that moving one 557 ton foundation block took a wooden capstan and pulley rig and about 512 workers. In a nearby quarry lies a 1,650 ton block, still attached to bedrock, fully excavated in 2014 by a German-Lebanese team and the largest ancient stone block ever found.

As Rome turned Christian, violence broke out: in 297 AD the actor Gelasinus was stoned after converting on stage during a parody of baptism. Constantine replaced the Venus Temple with a basilica, Theodosius destroyed the Temple of Jupiter, and Justinian shipped eight columns to Constantinople for the Hagia Sophia. Medieval rulers turned the ruins into a citadel, and locals credited King Solomon and his djinn with the stones. Kaiser Wilhelm II’s 1898 visit launched excavations under Otto Puchstein. In recent wars the city has been struck repeatedly, and UNESCO granted the site enhanced protection in November 2024.

• Emperor Trajan tested the oracle with a sealed blank page and got a blank page back
• Asked about his war with Parthia, Trajan received a broken centurion’s vine staff and died returning from the campaign
• In the 16th century the Polish prince Radziwill failed to recognize the ruins as Roman
• Scavengers gouged the columns for their iron bands and lead, weakening them
• Of the Temple of Jupiter’s 58 columns, nine stood before the 1759 earthquake and six after it