I feel a sense of pressure for the first actual blog post concerning historical events, one where I can't hide behind a bit of humour and have to show off my academic credentials - here goes.
Baalbek is a site which you've probably never heard of and I don't blame you, I have only just learnt about it this year but it is a better preserved site than half the Roman towns found in the West. The reasons Baalbek gets marginalised is due to its location in Lebanon, euro-centric thinking has hampered the study of Classics to discount anything beyond the Mediterranean and focus blindly on Greece and Rome. But it is an undeniable fact that the Romans were involved in the Middle East and for far longer than the West with the Byzantium empire. This flawed approach has caused a neglect of stunning settlements whose natural environments aid the preservation of materials.
Photos courtesy of Flickr users Khalid Albaih, Dongyi Liu and EK McConnell. Reproduction under Creative Commons license
However we are not interested in the stunning hexagonal sanctuary of Jupiter or most complete example we have of Roman temple (for this blog post at least). What I will be addressing is the Temple of mercury than only survives on coinage.
Bronze civic coin of Philip I (244-49CE) Price & Trell No. 703.
Coins are weird little things, historians place so much emphasis on them yet could you name whats on the back of 2, 5 or even 10p? The presumed model is that the images on coins were appreciated by the locals based on the sheer multitude of designs we see from the Roman Imperial period. However this is still tentative, but lets pretend that the coin image mattered and through this we can help understand things about Baalbek's identity and culture.
The head side represents the Emperor Philip I commonly known as Phillip the Arab as (you guessed it) he was from Arabia - the Romans weren't very imaginative with nicknames. The tails side represents the Temple of 'Mercury', air quotes are needed because the only identifier that this temple belongs to Mercury as opposed to any other god is a caedus present in the foreground. Cadeus looks like a funny word and that's because it is, it's latin for the staff which is the usual emblem of the Roman god Mercury or the Greek equivalent and much more famous Hermes. We know from other inscriptions found at Baalbek that there was a temple of Mercury located somewhere on the site but this coin could represent any temple.
What is striking about the view chosen of the temple, is that it comes from a birds eye point of view - back in the 2nd and 3rd century (to which the temple is dated) there were no drones and the temple was on an isolated peak. So why did the Romans chose a view they could not contemporarily see? The answer seems to lie in relation to other elements on the reverse of the coin, particularly the staircase and trees located below the temple. Both these elements put an emphasis on the height of the Temple as does the chosen birds-eye-view. There is a particular motivation to stress the elevation of the holy religious temple but why?
The elevation of sites plays into the traditions of the area before the Romans got involved, whilst it was still administered by the local Iturean dynasty. These were natives to Lebanon and believed high elevation sites allowed a greater accessibility to the divine and stresses the divine's holiness beyond the norm of daily human life. This is a religious tradition that finds examples throughout the Near East including at the famous site of Petra. Thus even at a highly Romanised site, Baalbek retained some local traditions showing how a Roman and Iturean identity worked together to provide this amalgamated religious complex reflective of both cultures.
It is worth noting that this blog post was inspired by Dr. Clare Rowan at the University of Warwick who set up a coin blog to help undergraduates improve their research skills and showcase their talents. Check it out : https://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/numismatics/