Posted on April 25, 2010 - by mira

Baalbek’s Temple of Jupiter

Only six Corinthian columns remain of the Temple of Jupiter’s 54 columns in Baalbek (named after the Phoenician sun god Baal), Lebanon – which was the Roman Empire’s City of the Sun, Heliopolis. The site, which also houses the temples of Bacchus and Venus, was one of the Empire’s largest. The Temple of Jupiter was built in the first century A.D.

Destroyed by several earthquakes, the temple’s remaining columns are reportedly the world’s tallest, at 22 meters high and 2.2 meters wide, and exhibit the superior workmanship of the builders: when measured in 1932, they were found to have remained accurately perpendicular, with less than one percent errors. The lion’s head gargoyle in the foreground is one of 38 that were placed on top of the columns to drain rainwater from the brick and cedar wood roof.