Ya Libnan

Lebanon’s ancient Roman temples of Baalbek, reborn

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Virtual tour project intended to raise awareness of the UN World Heritage site and encourage more tourism.

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Within the app, users will be able to explore a series of 38 fully interactive, 360-degree panoramas [Courtesy: Flyover Zone Productions and German Archaeological Institute]

By 

Robert McKelvey

Beirut, Lebanon – Located in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, Baalbek – also known in antiquity as Heliopolis – is a UNESCO World Heritage site, home to some of the largest and most impressive Roman temple ruins in the world.

A newly launched virtual tour, Baalbek Reborn: Temples, offers visitors from around the world the opportunity to see these awesome feats of ancient architecture and engineering, not only as they are today, but also as they would have been more than 2,000 years ago.

“There’s just something very special about the place,” Henning Burwitz, a building historian and architect with the German Archaeological Institute (DAI), told Al Jazeera.

“It’s scientifically an extremely interesting place, being one of the more eastern Roman cities and sanctuaries. It’s quite a statement to build something like this in such a remote part of the Roman Empire.”

Between the global COVID-19 pandemic and numerous internal crises, Lebanon’s economy – already largely dependent on new US dollars brought in by remittances, international tourists and foreign investors – has suffered greatly.

Rather than replace real-world tourism, Baalbek Reborn: Temples is intended to raise awareness around the world of this unique world heritage site and encourage more tourism to Lebanon in general.

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The project used computer-aided design software for 3D modelling [Courtesy: Flyover Zone Productions and German Archaeological Institute]

Created through a collaboration between the German Archaeological Institute (DAI), the General Directorate of Antiquities of Lebanon (DGA), the Lebanese Ministry of Culture, and US-based company Flyover Zone, this free virtual tour combines cutting-edge technology with the results of decades of archaeological research that is still ongoing.

The project used computer-aided design software such as AutoCAD and 3D Studio Max for 3D modelling, combing them with blueprint drawings provided by the DAI, along with 8K resolution panoramic photography from the ground and drone footage from above. Flyover Zone’s team then use a programme called Unity to integrate all these elements into their virtual simulation.

For Flyover Zone’s founder and president, Bernard Frischer, this project has been a dream come true. Within hours of its launch, the virtual tour had already surpassed 10,000 downloads.

“My day job still is that I’m a professor of informatics, and my branch of informatics is computing applied to cultural heritage,” he explained. “We started this company a few years ago to create virtual reconstructions of the most important cultural heritage sites around the world [using] 3D digital technology to visualize the latest scientific results, making it possible for the general public to take virtual trips through space and time.”

Within the app, users will be able to explore a series of 38 fully interactive, 360-degree panoramas, allowing them to investigate whatever might happen to catch their eye,

At the press of a button, a virtual tablet provided as part of the tour will provide text descriptions of locations, additional images, and an audio slider that controls the playback of a full audio-commentary soundtrack, produced in tandem with experts from the DAI and available in Arabic, English, French and German.

“The representation you can see will be tailored to the content of the commentary,” explained Burwitz. “If we explain the site today, you will see it as it looks today but if we talk about what it looked like in 215, the image will switch automatically to take you on a time travel to the year 215 and to show you what it looked like in antiquity.”

Frischer said there is “no point in doing this sort of reconstruction if it’s fanciful or artistic”.

“Yes, it should look beautiful and artistic in that sense, but if it’s only fanciful then it has no value, at least for academic purposes. The only way to make the model have value is to collaborate with the world’s experts who’ve been working on these monuments and really know all the details of what they looked like. So for Baalbek that would be the DAI, and thank God they agreed to help us.”

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Some sites, such as the Temple of Bacchus, have been remarkably well-preserved and are still standing today [Courtesy: Flyover Zone Productions and German Archaeological Institute]

The DAI, a research institute in the field of archaeology under the federal foreign office of Germany, has been actively involved with the historical investigation of Baalbek’s temples and the surrounding area for more than 20 years, continuing a tradition of German-Lebanese archaeological cooperation that goes back centuries.

Some sites, such as the Temple of Bacchus, have been remarkably well-preserved and are still standing today. Others have almost completely disappeared, leaving behind only scant but nonetheless impressive remains, such as the six remaining rose granite columns – each more than 20 metres (66 feet) high and about 2 metres (6.5 feet) in diameter – that once framed the now absent Temple of Jupiter.

“Our part was to make sure the correct scientific bases were chosen,” said Burwitz. “We can see in the reconstruction the full extent of this marvellous building. We want you to feel like being on-site.”

Frischer said for a real sense of presence, nothing beats a virtual reality headset while on the tour.

“On the other hand, let’s say you move around a lot and even maybe you’re going to travel to Baalbek; putting it on your smartphone is a good way to go. Of course, it’s free so you don’t have to choose,” he said.

The tour is available online and free of charge thanks to funding provided by Bassam Alghanim, a retired Kuwaiti banker and archaeology enthusiast who financed the project in memory of his parents, Yusuf and Ilham Alghanim.

Baalbek Reborn: Temples will also be used to promote another joint project between the DGA and Lebanese NGO arcenciel, which will provide vocational training courses teaching heritage crafting skills, with a goal of creating a skilled workforce of young artisans who will support further restoration projects in Beirut.

“We wanted to take advantage of this launch and all the attendant publicity to help Lebanon – particularly Beirut – to recover from the terrible explosion of August 4,” said Frischer. “We had a great collaboration with the ministry of culture [and we] wanted to give something back by tying our initiative to this charitable initiative.”

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A virtual tablet provided as part of the tour provides text descriptions of locations, additional images, and an audio slider [Courtesy: Flyover Zone Productions and German Archaeological Institute]

ALJAZEERA

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8 responses to “Lebanon’s ancient Roman temples of Baalbek, reborn”

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    https://detaly.co.il/hanaanskaya-nadpis-najdennaya-v-izraile-nedostayushhee-zveno-v-istorii-alfavita/
    Canaanite Inscription Found in Israel – “The Missing Link” in the History of the Alphabet

    Archaeologists excavating the ancient Canaanite settlement of Lachish have unearthed a 3,500-year-old earthenware shard that they believe was the oldest text found in Israel, written in alphabetical writing. Earlier Canaanite texts are known, but they were written in hieroglyphs or cuneiform

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      The discovery of the text, executed in alphabetic writing, fills a gap in the early history of writing, which, apparently, was developed in ancient Egypt by Canaanite settlers. From the Levant, the alphabetic writing system spread throughout the world, and remains the most common writing system to this day.

      Returning to Lachish: the tiny shard is the remains of an earthen vase brought from Cyprus; the inscription on it was done in ink in Canaan. This fragment of a vase, measuring only 4 by 3.5 centimeters, contains several characters freely located on two lines. The artifact was discovered in 2018 by an Austrian expedition during excavations in Lachish and published on April 15 in the journal Antiquity

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        Experts are still trying to decipher the short text (more on that below), but one thing they are sure of is that it can be dated to around 1450 BC, the beginning of the Late Bronze Age. This gives researchers a “missing link” in the history of the alphabet linking earlier alphabetical inscriptions found in Egypt and Sinai with later texts found in Canaan, says Felix Hoflmeier, a researcher at the Archaeological Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences

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          Over the next Iron Age, this Proto-Canaanite alphabet evolved into the writing systems used by the peoples of the Levant. The ancient Israelites used it to write TANAKH, while the Phoenician version of the letter was spread by merchants across the Mediterranean, to Greece, and then to Rome – eventually becoming the Latin alphabet

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            When hieroglyphs are confusing

            But the origin of the alphabet is still shrouded in mystery. The earliest examples of alphabetic writing were found in Wadi al-Khol, in the desert in western Egypt, and in Serabit al-Khadim, an ancient Egyptian mine in the south of Sinai, where turquoise was mined, explains Hoflmeier – they were inscribed on stones. These so-called Proto-Sinai texts date back to the 19th or 18th centuries BC, and scholars generally believe that they were executed by Canaanite laborers or slaves who lived in Egypt nearly 4,000 years ago. Unaware of the complex pictograms of Egyptian writing, they used some hieroglyphs to represent the sounds of their own Semitic language

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            For example, the Egyptian hieroglyph “house” – “beit” in both Hebrew and ancient Canaanite – was used to refer to the phoneme “b”.
            One of the key questions facing scholars is when and how this early Semitic alphabet returned from Egypt to Canaan. The earliest confidently dated alphabetic inscriptions in the Levant date back at most to the 12th or 13th century BC. – that is, about half a millennium after their proto-Sinai predecessors

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            This is why the recently discovered text from Lachish is so important. “This closes the gap between early alphabetic writing in Sinai and later texts in the South Levant,” says Hoflmeier.

            There are several other Levantine inscriptions, including one on a dagger discovered at Lachish, which may be from a slightly earlier date, but experts disagree about the dating of these texts and whether they are indeed alphabetic

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            In contrast, the Lachish shard is confidently dated to the middle of the 15th century BC. This was done using radiocarbon dating of organic materials found in the same archaeological layer as the inscription. Discovered in a large building that was part of Lachish’s fortifications of the Late Bronze Age, the shard was once part of a decorated ceramic bowl brought from Cyprus, as Hoflmeier and his colleagues write in an Antiquity article.
            This is not unusual, since during the Bronze Age, Lachish was a major city mentioned in ancient Egyptian records. This city, located halfway between Jerusalem and Be’er Sheva, had monumental structures and was a center for imports of goods from all over the Eastern Mediterranean. Centuries later, in the Iron Age, it became a key settlement in the ancient Israelite Kingdom of Judah and is repeatedly mentioned in the TANAKH

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