Archaeologists excavating a necropolis uncovered by construction workers in Beirut only two weeks before war broke out between Hezbollah and Israel had to stop work this summer when Israeli bombs started falling on the country.
But Fadi Beayno and his team were lucky. The 300-square-metre dig on a quiet street in the Christian district of Ashrafiyeh was spared any bombing.
Ironically, however, the first bombs to strike the centre of the capital during the 34-day war hit only about 100m away, destroying some water-boring machinery.
Beayno said it belonged to the same man providing equipment for the building being erected on the site of the dig, and that he suffered a heart attack on hearing the news and died.
The 37 graves so far discovered, dating from between the first and beginning of the third centuries, were undamaged.
Little is yet known about the site, except that some graves had masonry frames with either terra cotta or lead coffins. Other bodies were buried in wooden coffins.
Beayno said his 22-man team is removing the remains as quickly as possible, so that construction can continue, and that the findings will be analysed afterwards.
But while the Ashrafiyeh site was spared the damage of war, the same cannot be said for some of the ancient ruins that dot the country, dating back beyond the Romans, the Greeks and the Phoeniceans.
A team from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) has already begun assessing the damage from 34 days of bombing and shelling to often fragile structures, already ravaged by time, earthquakes, looting and previous wars.
This tiny country, about the size of the state of Connecticut, has no less than five entries on Unesco’s World Heritage List. Perhaps the most famous is Baalbek, called Heliopolis by the Romans, about 90km east of Beirut. It is perhaps most famous for the stunning remains of the Temple of Jupiter, but there are also temples to Bacchus and Venus.
Unesco’s deputy director general, Mounir Bouchnaki, said “the major sites registered on the World Heritage List suffered damages, but it was minimal”.
He has visited not only Baalbek, but also sites in Tyre, on the southern Mediterranean coast and Byblos, north of the capital, and said more time will be needed to assess the true extent of damage.
Bouchnaki told a press conference in Paris last Monday that the stones of the port will have to be cleaned by hand, one at a time, and that the cost could reach $100Â 000.
“If we do not deal with this before the winter, it will truly be a disaster,” he said.
At Baalbek, the six columns of the Temple of Jupiter that have captivated visitors for centuries, are nearly 6,5m in diameter and more than 21m tall, rising from a base and an entablature that takes them to an awe-inspiring 38m above the surrounding plain.
The temple is located only about 300m from the centre of Baalbek, which was a stronghold of the Lebanese Shi’ite movement Hezbollah and repeatedly targeted by Israeli bombing.
It was spared any direct hits, but Professor Giorgio Croci, a specialist on the temple who was part of the Unesco team, said “new cracks appeared during the Israeli offensive and a plan of action needs to be developed quickly”.
Bouchnaki said a detailed evaluation needs to be carried out over the next six months to determine the true extent of damage.
Cracks in stone were not the only damage caused in Baalbek. For the past 50 years, the town has been host to an international festival of art, music and dance each summer, and rehearsal for opening night was taking place the day the war broke out on July 12.
Tourism revenues lost by the cancellation of this year’s festival have been estimated at $900Â 000.
Meanwhile, at a Phoenician port in Byblos, damage was of a different sort.
Early in the war, Israeli warplanes knocked out a power plant south of Beirut, and 15Â 000 tonnes of fuel oil poured into the Mediterranean, severely polluting a large swathe of Lebanon’s coastline and that of Syria to the north.
At the Byblos port, Bouchnaki said “we have begun an urgent plan to clean and reinforce the structures”.
And in Tyre, a missile fired at a building near the Roman hippodrome missed its target and hit a mausoleum, destroying some frescoes. Fortunately, there was no other damage.
There are other important archaeological sites in the south of Lebanon where most of the heavy combat and bombing took place, such as at Shemaa and Bint Jbeil. But so far, no assessment has been made of damage there. — AFP