BAALBEK, barbek, a ruined city in Sy ria, on the lower slope of the Antilibanus, 3,839 feet above sea-level, 40 miles from Damascus, famous for its magnificent ruins. Irregular in form, and encompassed by a wall two miles in circumference, it was once the most magnificent of Syrian cities, and is the Heliopolis of the Graeco-Roman world. Of its ruins, the chief is the temple of the Sun, built either by Anto nius Pius or Severus; a rectangu lar building by 160 feet. Some of the blocks used in its construction are 60 feet long by 13 thick; and its 54 columns of which six are still standing, were 72 feet high and 22 in circumference. Near it is a temple of Jupiter, of smaller size, though still larger than the Parthenon at Athens, which has been described as once the most perfect and the most mag nificent monument of ancient art in Syria' Standing in the village of Baalbek—now a cluster of mean dwellings — 300 yards from the other buildings, is a circular temple containing six columns in the mixed Ionian and Grecian style. The quarries from which the temples
were reared are in the immediate vicinity. Originally a centre of the sun-worship, it became a Roman colony under Julius Cmsar, was gar risoned by Augustus and under Trajan ac quired renown as the seat of an oracle. Under Constantine its temples became churches, but after being sacked by the Arabs in 748, and more completely pillaged by Tamerlane in 1401, it sank into hopeless decay. The work of de struction was completed by an earthquake in 1759. The Prussian government began im portant excavations in 1902. Consult Baedeker, 'Syria and Palestine' ; Frauberger, (Die Alcrop olis von Baalbek' (1802); Murray's (Hand book to Syria and Palestine); Puchstein, in (Jahrbuch des deutschen Arclueologischen In stituts' (Berlin 1902) ; (Fiihrer durch die Rupinen von Baalbek) (Berlin 1905) ; Thomp son, W. M., (The Land and the Book' (Vol. III, New York 1886) ; Wood and Dawkins, 'The Ruins of Baalbek' (London 1757).