PH03 Nebi Younes — single hall church

Summary information

• Location

  GPS coordinates: 33.66169, 35.41927

  Coordinates are approximate.

• Description

  The building had the shape of a small rectangle in plan (internally: 7.41 x 4.60 m) and was built of small materials, preserved only 1 m high. The at the east end were two high niches, on either side of a narrow apse from which we do not know whether it projected or not, because the exterior facing of the walls was not cleared and examined. The plan is completed by two entrances, one off-centered to the left, in the facade, the other in the long right wall two-thirds of the distance to the east. This second door connected the interior of the nave with two large adjoining rooms placed at right angles in the extension of the apse.

  The floor was organized into a large rectangular carpet with a medallion in the center and a circular inscription in the apse.

  Pauline Donceel-Voûte and Bernadette Gillain, Les pavements des églises byzantines de Syrie et du Liban: Volume I : Décor, archéologie et liturgie, Publications d’histoire de l’art et d’archéologie de l’université catholique de Louvain 69 (Institut Supérieur d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art Collège Érasme, 1988), 407.

  We conclude that a monastery existed in this place on the Phoenician coast under the reign of the Emperor Maurice. No doubt it was only a chapel of this convent that was discovered; its floor and its two adjoining rooms are all that we know. It is interesting to observe a sort of reduced format for the eastern wall with three apses at the end of the single nave. The two niches evoke side apses and one cannot fail to restore an altar in the central apse. The sanctuary flanked by its tiny sacristies is drawn by the connection made outside the mosaic field. The function of the two niches – resting places for oblates or for reliquaries for example – remains entirely hypothetical.

  Pauline Donceel-Voûte and Bernadette Gillain, Les pavements des églises byzantines de Syrie et du Liban: Volume I : Décor, archéologie et liturgie, Publications d’histoire de l’art et d’archéologie de l’université catholique de Louvain 69 (Institut Supérieur d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art Collège Érasme, 1988), 410.

• Phasing

  It is the two dates provided that are the problem. Ultimately, only one reading solution is valid: it consists of reading “from 695”, which gives you, in the era of Sidon (which begins in 110 BC. AD), the year 585 AD, which actually corresponds to the 3rd year of indiction and the first four months of a 4th year of indiction.

  All work on the building ends in the month of Panemos, June according to the current Macedonian calendar, when the bulk of the mosaic work, that is to say the ornamental mosaic of the nave, had been completed in the month of Peritios, January. We will have completed them with this small white apse, with the only inscription. The work on the entire building ends under Sabatios and it is he who executes the inscription, but he follows the usual formula with the mention of his predecessor Khabber and the part that the latter took to work. This is a fairly common process, of which there are other examples.

  Pauline Donceel-Voûte and Bernadette Gillain, Les pavements des églises byzantines de Syrie et du Liban: Volume I : Décor, archéologie et liturgie, Publications d’histoire de l’art et d’archéologie de l’université catholique de Louvain 69 (Institut Supérieur d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art Collège Érasme, 1988), 409.

• Bibliogaphy

  Donceel-Voûte, Pauline, and Bernadette Gillain. Les pavements des églises byzantines de Syrie et du Liban: Volume I : Décor, archéologie et liturgie. Publications d’histoire de l’art et d’archéologie de l’université catholique de Louvain 69. Institut Supérieur d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art Collège Érasme, 1988.