The Convent of the Franciscaines in Badaro holds a weekly Monday lecture, the latest of which shed fascinating light on the archaeological vestiges of the site of Yanouh in Mount Lebanon. The lecturer was an enthusiastic Pierre Louis Gatier, Director of Research at the CNRS and the Maison de l'Orient in Lyon, who is responsible for the archaeological mission of Yanouh and the upper valley of Nahr Ibrahim. This mission was launched in 99, when Gatier was a professor at the USJ, for the benefit of archaeology students, but also because no real excavation had ever been carried out in the Lebanese mountains, which left many historical questions unanswered. In particular Gatier and his team were interested in verifying the generally accepted theory that the mountain was not cultivated, and therefore not inhabited, before the Middle Ages (8th to 10th century) when the Maronites sought refuge in its difficult landscape.
This area chosen, Aqoura, presents two sites of interest: the Afqa grotto, and Yanouh itself, located 1200m above sea level. Before excavating Yanouh, the team started with an investigation of the valley. This alone yielded many signs that the theory was inaccurate, and that this part of the mountain had in fact been occupied at all of the following periods: Bronze and Iron Age, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and finally Medieval onwards. The clues to this effect range from ceramics to wine presses, and also include the presence of ancient agricultural terraces, and of the stelae of Emperor Hadrian: these were inscriptions forbidding the cutting of any more trees, a sure sign that the area was already heavily cultivated.
One of the most meaningful finds however was that of the remains of a tell (a succession of villages on one hill). It is surrounded by a belt of tombs of a typology so unique that they are now known as "tombs of the Yanouh type": pits dug into the ground, closed by a natural slab of rock, but with walls constructed out of hewn stone. The tombs belong to either the old or the middle Bronze Age, which dramatically pushes back the known date of the mountain's occupation.
Gatier intersperses his presentation with folkoric and historical anecdotes. For instance the story of Queen Zenobia of Palmyre, who sent messengers to the oracle-lake at Afqa as she was about to embark on her conquest of the Orient, to find out if her entreprise would be successful. The offerings thrown into the lake were supposed to sink to the bottom if they were accepted, but hers floated back in refusal. "She should have stopped. She went on. It wasn't a happy ending," concludes the lecturer before moving on to the story of the Crusader castle of le Moinestre (now known as el Hosn). The Frank lord of the castle asked a local Emir to send him a physician. Upon arrival the latter was presented with a knight wounded in the leg. He prescribed one of his balms, but a Frank stepped forward with an axe and cut the unhappy patient's leg instead, killing him in a few hours. When the Franks against ignored him to apply salt and vinegar to a woman's head wound, killing her as well, the physician took leave and returned to Sheizar where he told the tale to the Emir, who chronicled it and concluded the Franks were barbarians.
Presently we come to the site of Yanouh, where until the 60's all that was visible were parts of a Roman temple. At that period it was restored, but no archaeological work was done, so we will never know just what the workers found: all we know is that precious indications were destroyed forever and only a few pieces of the puzzle were left for Gatier's team to make sense of. On a plan that they update as they go, we are shown a 12th century medieval chapel, a 2nd century Roman temple inside a wall called peribole, a Byzantine basilica leaning against the wall and a small Roman shrine shouldering the most exciting structure of the lot: a Hellenistic ritual platform, extremely rare in Lebanon. The temple was turned into a church when the chapel was built, and became known as St George the Blue due to its limestone gone bluish with age. It presents a feature typical of Lebanese Roman temples: the adyton, an elevated platform at the back of the temple. "The best examples can be found in the temple of Bacchus in Baalbek", Gatier says. A humbler version of the massive temple, Yanouh presents however one completely original feature: two tall windows on either side of the central axis, apparently for the sole purpose of looking inside. A thousand years later, due to the natural process of stratification, the ground had risen around the temple and the windows were now level with the ground: when the temple was converted into a church, they naturally became its gates. Little more is known of the site at the moment, save that it was partially destroyed by fire in the 7th century.
Despite the scarcity of surviving clues, the team is slowly filling the gaps in the known history of Yanouh and consequently, bringing to light the human history of the mountain itself. More information can be found in an article published in the Museum's publication Baal #5, and another to be published in issue #6.
      |
Article by Joumana Medlej |