Abstract EN:

The Roman colony Berytus, founded by Augustus under the name Colonia Augusta Felix Berytus, took over from a city of the Phoenician coast. This colonial founding, however, was also accompanied by an in-deph modification of the civic territory, which from then on crossed Mount Lebanon. A consequence of this extension was the integration of the heliopolis sanctuary into the public religion of the new colony. Added to the traditional cohabitation between the indigenous population and the colons, in a colony in which Roman veterans were also settled, was the unprecedented coming into contact of the Greco-Phoenician wolrd and the Beqaa valley. My topic bears on these mixed contacts, both human and territorial, by privileging the religious lens. The religions that came into contact here stemmed from different traditions, including those of the colons from Rome and Italy, whose descendents were always more or less 'connected' to the metropole, that of the Hellenized coastal populations who inherited cultural traits specific to phoenician space, and that of the populations of the interior who were at the crossraods of influences. I privilege three places of contact. First, the administrative center, in which the colonial authorities elaborated a new civic ideology; then, the extra-urban sanctuary of Deir el-Qaala, which was the place of a new cohabitation; and lastly, the religious landscape of Beqaa, which revolved around the great sanctuary of Heliopolis. In particular, the aim is to analyze the Heliopolitan cult in its colonial context, both juridical and territorial, and to revisit the question of the 'Heliopolitan triad' as viewed from Berytus.