Tell Arqa

Tell Arqa, also known as Arka, Arca Caesarea or Caesarea ad Libanum, is an archaeological site near the village of Minyara in Lebanon, 12 km north-east of Tripoli. Its position is strategic, because it controls the roads leading from Tripoli towards Tartous and Homs. The region is well watered, a coastal alluvial plain probably favourable to human settlement for a long time, and a river runs at the foot of the hill, which holds remains going back to the Neolithic.

The oldest artefacts, found in survey of the surrounding plain, seem to date from the Natufian and the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. The oldest levels reached by excavation in Area 1 go back to Early Bronze Age II (2800-2650 BC), when the settlement can already be seen as a small, organised urban centre. Level 16 (Early Bronze IV) was burned around 2300 BC, which preserved its houses exceptionally well, to more than three metres in height, with burnt brick walls and burnt cedar and palm wood beams and floors. The ground floor held small square storage compartments full of burnt wheat, and the first floor was living and working space. The Middle Bronze Age is known from a potter's workshop, many silos and a cemetery used for almost half a millennium, whose most remarkable tomb held a warrior or chief with a set of bronze weapons.

In the Late Bronze Age the site seems to lose regional importance, and the town was destroyed by Thutmose III around 1450 BC. It was deserted throughout the early Iron Age and reoccupied only in Iron Age II, as a shrine shows. In antiquity the city was called Irqata. The elders of the city-state wrote to the pharaoh Akhenaten asking for help against the Apiru, in a letter that belongs to the Amarna letters. Pliny the Elder cites Arca alongside the cities of the Decapolis without making it one of them, and the Roman emperor Severus Alexander was born at Arca Caesarea in 208.

During the First Crusade the Frankish army reached Arqa on 12 February 1099 and was blocked there by the Muslims in the fortress. Raymond de Saint-Gilles lost Anselme de Ribemont and Pons de Balazuc there, and after three months he lifted the siege and went on to Jerusalem. In 1108 Guillaume Jourdain took the town after three weeks of siege. In 1167 Nur ad-Din tried to take Arqa, and King Amalric I gave it to the Hospitallers. In 1266, as the county of Tripoli collapsed, Baybars took the citadel from them.

Tell Arqa is a other / unclassified in Phoenicia, Lebanon. Wikidata describes it as: archaeological site in Akkar District, Lebanon. Dating: 1400 BCE to 1300 BCE. No English Wikipedia article exists for it; the full text below is the French article "Tell Arqa", shown in the original language.