The Claudius Tower

This archaeological sdtructure has an inscription with dedication to roman emperor Claudius, who rebuilt it: that's the reason of its name.

It rests on a cubic plinth of 15.67 m on each side where two openings have been made: halfway up, perpendicular to the eastern side of the Claudius tower, an external staircase of eighteen steps leads to the main door, while another, smaller door is at ground level in the southeast corner. Above the plinth, a few blocks belonging to the upper parts of the building allow its elevation to be restored. On the upper course of the plinth rest two steps, where stands the floor decorated with pilasters topped with capitals with brackets. The pilasters support a Doric entablature, crowned by a cornice adorned with a torus and an Egyptian throat. A loggia opens onto the eastern facade, directly above the main entrance. A system of narrow corridors and sideways spiral staircases allows circulation inside the building and ends in a small rectangular room in the central core of the matched masonry block.

The monument is essential a large platform (a "high place of worship"), where large animals could be sacrificed. This means that the platform had to be accessible, and there are indeed stairs inside the large stone cube. More famous examples of this type of structure are the altar-towers in the Great Court in front of the Temple of Jupiter in Baalbek.The platform itself shows traces of pillars and the pedestals of two statues, so we may assume that there was a second storey: a kind of loggia, with a ceiling that we can no longer reconstruct. The statues must have represented the emperor Claudius and Beelgalasus (a supreme god). Livius^[9]

The unusual appearance of the building has sometimes led to the tower being considered sometimes as a tomb, sometimes as a monumental "altar" (that is the most common opinion of archaeologists like Yasmine), sometimes as a lookout post coupled with an honorary monument.^[10]

The Great Sanctuary

The sanctuary is nestled in the dolomitic limestone formations, between the tower sector to the north and that of the small temple to the south. Its peribolus wall delimits an enclosure approximately 75 m long and 35 m wide, with the long sides to the north and south.

Towards the west, it only continues for about 30m to the north and 15m to the south, before hitting the rocks. In the north, these have been roughly cut to give an approximately regular shape to the temenos. To the west and south, however, they are in the rough, so the temple clings to the rock face. To the east, the facade of the sanctuary is adorned with engaged pilasters and bordered by a decastyle portico about 6 m deep. This portico was recently restored. Clearing the area east of the enclosure revealed a limestone altar-tower measuring approximately 4.30 m by 4.10 m, devoid of moldings at the base and crowned with an Egyptian gorge.

A large door fitted in the middle of the facade of the peribola gives access to the Sanctuary. The interior space of the temenos is divided into two parts: a paved courtyard, roughly square and bordered by Tuscan porticos on three sides, precedes the upper terrace where the temple rises, beyond a flight of 'staircase covering the entire width of the sanctuary. The remains of a monumental sandstone and limestone altar are preserved in the courtyard, slightly offset to the south from the median axis of the temple.

The temple is aligned with the median axis of the peribolus. It rests on a solid foundation and not on a real podium. It was a hexastyle prostyle temple of the Corinthian order, about 40 m. long and 18 m. wide, with a pronaos and a long cella at the bottom of which rose the platform of an adyton. The walls of the building are built in double apparatus, mainly with blocks cut in the yellow ocher sandstone, while the prostyle consists of blocks of gray limestone.

Julie Yasmine date the construction of the Sanctuary in the middle of the 1st century, under Claudius. The attribution of the Sanctuary to the Heliopolitan Jupiter is admitted also by other archaeologists, like D. Krencker and W. Zschietzschmann.