Public Baths in Lebanon from the Romans to the Umayyads

Download or read book Public Baths in Lebanon from the Romans to the Umayyads written by Martine Michel Francis and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the Roman Empire bathhouses were built to fulfill the needs of a Roman lifestyle. Several sites in Roman Lebanon have yielded bath structures of significant size. Unfortunately, investigations carried out previously were of a rather superficial nature, and except for a few brief descriptions, they provided almost no literature on Roman baths of Lebanon. Further research is needed to understand the different aspects of the existing bath structures.--The first chapter presents the cultural and historical background of classical Greece since the gymnasium was bom and first institutionalized till its absorption into a new institution, the Roman thermae. The second chapter deals with the architectural history of such institutions. In the third chapter, a detailed study of three different bathhouse types from Lebanon will be presented. The bathhouses belonging to the early tradition of Single Axis Row type baths of the second century BC Pompeian type, and the bathhouses which belong to the later Imperial Thermae. The third type of bathhouses studied in this thesis falls outside the chronological classification of Krencker's bath types: the Umayyad bathhouse at 'Anjar, dating to the 8,h century AD, belongs to the same concept of Roman public bathing but shows some local characteristics which will be compared to other Umayyad bathhouses in Syria and Jordan.--This study hopes to provide enough information on Roman baths in Lebanon to place them within the broader context of classified Roman bathhouses. The aim of this thesis is also to collect a substantial database on all bathhouses known in Lebanon in order to prepare the ground for a more specific and detailed analysis of the individual baths in Lebanon.