Travel-World Photography
To reach Beqaa Valley from Beirut takes you over a mountain road that reach an elevation of 1510 m. The valley lies between the coastal mountain range and the Anti-Lebanon mountain range to the east, bordering on Syria.
Beqaa Valley is the main agricultural area of Lebanon. In the northern part nomads still live with their livestock. On a visit the home of my assistant at work, we encountered two nomad families. I took pictures, and my assistant later returned with copies of the pictures. They told him that it was the first tile ever they had pictures of themselves. This happened in 1994!
The Romans were her as well. The built Heliopolis, which now carries the name of Baalbek, in the middle of the valley. One of the principal structures on the site is the Temple of Jupiter. It isa massive building, entered by a entrance-way, leading to a forecourt and then to a rectangular main court 104.5 m long and 103 m wide. The court opens onto a portico whose 84 granite columns. The roof above the portico still stands, with well preserved detailed stone work.
Another impressive structure is the Temple of Bacchus, of which only portions remain. It stands on a high terrace at the western end of the court. The building had 54 columns, each 19 m high and 2.3 m in diameter. Allowing for a slight taper towards the top, the weight of each column is about 210 tons, a formidable transportation task!
Other ruins include a round Temple of Venus, remains of the town walls, and traces of a temple dedicated to Hermes.
The columns were transported from Aswan in Upper Egypt, down 1100 km the Nile, and then new 1100 km up the Mediterranean to the northern part of Lebanon. There, the mountain pass is less than 1000 m, leading south up the Beqaa Valley to Baalbek at 1170 m elevation.
The city outer walls or foundations are built with huge blocks of stone from a nearby quarry, weighing about 800 tons (!) each. One may only wonder how the Romans were able to undertake such a fantastic engineering feat.
Further south of Baalbek lies Ajar. The town is from the beginning of the 8th century, as a palace-city. Today, the remaining ruins attributes to the engineering skills of the builders.
