Anjar
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How it came to be
Anjar in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley was built in the early 8th century under the Umayyad caliph al-Walid I. Syriac graffiti in its quarry give the year 714. It was a trading town where the road from Beirut to Damascus crossed the road from Homs to Tiberias.
The town is a walled rectangle with 40 towers. Two main streets, north-south and east-west, divide it into four quarters and meet at a tetrapylon. The caliph's palace and the mosque stood in the south-east quarter, and smaller palaces and baths in the north-east.
The town was never finished. When Walid's son Ibrahim was defeated in 744, it was abandoned, partly destroyed. Archaeologists found the site at the end of the 1940s, and since 1939 Armenian refugees from Musa Dagh have lived beside it. It was inscribed in 1984.
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