History of Baalbeck

Ottoman Empire. But Ottoman jurisdiction was merely nominal in the Lebanon. Baalbek, badly shaken in the Near East earthquake of 1759, was really in the hands of the Metawali who retained it against other Lebanese tribes. The colossal and picturesque ruins attracted particularly intrepid Westerners since the 18th century. English visitor Robert Wood was not simply a tourist: his carefully measured drawings were engraved for The Ruins of Baalbek (1757), which provided some excellent new detail in the Corinthian order that British and European Neoclassical architects added to their vocabulary. Robert Adam, for example, based a bed and one of the ceilings at Osterley House on the ceiling of the Temple of Bacchus, and the portico of St George's, Bloomsbury is based on that temple's portico.

Even after Jezzar Pasha, the rebel governor of Acre province, broke the power of the Metawali in the last half of the 18th century, Baalbek was no destination for the traveller unaccompanied by an armed guard. The chaos that succeeded his death in 1804 was ended only by the Egyptian occupation in 1832. With the treaty of London (1840) Baalbek became really Ottoman, the Encyclopædia Britannica (1911) reported and since about 1864 had attracted great numbers of tourists. In November 1898, the German Emperor Wilhelm II on his way to Jerusalem and passing by Baalbek was equally struck by the magnificence of the ruins projecting from the rubble and the dreary condition. Within a month, the German archaeological team he dispatched was at work on the site. The campaign produced meticulously presented and illustrated series of volumes