Syria Trails › Places

Temple of Bel

معبد بل

Palmyra's greatest temple, dedicated to Bel in the 1st century AD, later a church and then a mosque; its cella was destroyed in 2015.

The Temple of Bel was Palmyra's greatest and most sacred temple, dedicated in the 1st century AD to Bel, head of the city's pantheon. It stood in a vast walled sanctuary lined with colonnades, the setting for the city's great religious festivals.

Its design blended a Greco-Roman exterior of Corinthian columns with local Semitic ritual: the entrance was on the long side, the roof flat, and the ceilings of its inner shrines carried superb carved astral motifs.

The temple was consecrated to Bel in AD 32, worshipped in a triad with the lunar god Aglibol and the sun god Yarhibol, and formed the centre of Palmyra's religious life. It stood on a mound whose layers show human occupation back to the third millennium BC; the walls of its precinct and its entrance were built in the late 1st and early 2nd centuries, the precinct wall running about 205 metres. The cella was ringed by Corinthian columns and held two inner sanctuaries, north and south, for Bel and other local gods; in the northern one was a relief of the seven planets surrounded by the twelve signs of the zodiac. It was closed in the late Roman Empire during a campaign against pagan temples in the East (385–388), and in 1132 parts were modified and it became a mosque.

It lived on after paganism, becoming a church in Byzantine times and later a mosque; villagers lived inside its fortified courtyard until the 1930s, when they were moved to the modern town for excavations. The main hall was destroyed in August 2015. The enclosure walls and parts of the porticoes survive.

Note: photos may not reflect the site's current condition.

For the visitor

Photos

Photos: Bernard Gagnon — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA) · Vyacheslav Argenberg — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY) · Mbenoist — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA) · Institut Français Du Proche-Orient (ifpo) — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY)