Entitled: "Columns of Temple of the Sun." The Temple of Jupiter was begun during the reign of Emperor Augustus in the late 1st century BC and completed soon after 60 AD. The single largest religious edifice ever erected by the Romans, the immense sanctuary of Jupiter Heliopolitanus was lined by 104 massive granite columns, imported from Aswan in Egypt, and held a temple surrounded by 50 additional columns, almost 62 feet high. Heliopolis remained the most holy of temple structures until Christianity was declared the official religion of the Roman Empire in 313 AD, following which the Byzantine Christian emperors and their soldiers desecrated thousands of pagan sanctuaries. At the end of the 4th century, Emperor Theodosius destroyed many significant buildings and statues, and constructed a basilica with stones from the Temple of Jupiter. As late as the 16th century, the Temple of Jupiter still held 27 standing columns out an original 58; there were only nine before the 1759 earthquakes and six remain today. Baalbek is a town in the Beqaa Valley of Lebanon situated east of the Litani River. After Alexander the Great conquered the Near East in 334 BC, the existing settlement was named Heliopolis. The city retained its religious function during Greco-Roman times, when the sanctuary of the Heliopolitan Jupiter-Baal was a pilgrimage site, and one of the largest sanctuaries in the empire. Photographed by Peter Bergheim, circa 1860-80.