One of the Baalbek Temples
The ruins of Bakhos temple are lit up during a performance by British singer Mika at the opening of the Baalbeck International Festival among the ruins of the Roman city of Baalbeck REUTERS

A group of excavators from the German Archaeological Institute have found a huge ancient monolith in Baalbeck, Lebanon. The gargantuan structure, which is still partly buried, measures 64 feet long and 18 feet high and weighs 1,650 tonnes. This is so far the largest excavated ancient stone block in the world.

Two other massive stone blocks were unearthed in the same quarry ealier. One of which, the Hajjar al-Hibla or The Stone of the Pregnant Woman was found in the 1900s. It weighs around 1000 tonnes while the other larger stone, underneath, weighs is 1, 240. The second stone was discovered in the 1990s. Archaeologists think that these structures may have been abandoned by the ancients for having poor stone quality.

The archaeology team is led by Jeanine Abdul Massih, who has been working on the Baalbek exploration for quite a few years. The project intends to find out how ancient people quarried, polished and moved these blocks, which are were likely made in around 27 BCE. The archaeologists believe that the boulders were intended to be transported and utilized without being broken into smaller blocks. Some scholars think that these structures pre-exist the Roman era and were built during the reign of Alexander the Great, the founder of Heliopolis.

The gigantic monolith was dug up near the relics of the temple complex in Baalbek, which is one of the world heritage sites listed in 1984. In ancient times, Baalbek was called Heliopolis which means city of the sun. During the rule of the Roman Empire, this is where some of the largest temples were built. People of Heliopolis worshipped several Roman deities such as Jupiter, Venus and Bacchus and built sacred places in their honour. The three temples had a mixture of Roman and Lebanese structural designs.

Baalbek explorers presume that the blocks that were recently discovered were created to be part of these three temples. There were similar towering structures in found the ruins of Temple of Jupiter Some of these block which were used as podiums are known as the Trilithon.

The next phase of the research intends to discover more about the ancient technology and techniques used in mining and transporting these enormous structures. This project is made possible through cooperation with the Lebanese University, the Baalbek Project of the Orient Department of the German Archaeological Institute and the Lebanese Council of Antiquities.