abandoned between the 17th and 18th centuries. However, by the 1820s, it was among the first villages in the Jabal Hauran to be repopulated by Druze migrants from Mount Lebanon. At the time, five or six Druze families settled the village. Because of its Roman past, Qanawat already had paved pathways, readily available empty houses and water sources. However, its population had only incrementally increased between 1830 and 1850. Though during that period it became the home of Druze religious sheikhs, it was not until the 1850s that was Qanawat established as the seat of the preeminent shaykh al-aql (Druze religious leader) and the center of local Druze politics. Following further Druze migration to the area after the 1860 Mount Lebanon civil war, Qanawat grew into a large village. The first shaykh al-aql of Qanawat was Ibrahim al-Hajari who played a key role in mobilizing Druze resistance to the conscription orders of the Egyptian governor Ibrahim Pasha in the late 1830s. Ibrahim died in 1840 and was succeeded by his son Husayn. Qanawat at the time was under the control of the Al Hamdan, the leading Druze family of the Hauran. However, under Husayn’s leadership, the Hajari family formed the mashaykat al-aql, which gradually became the main religious institution recognized by the Druze of Hauran. The Al Hamdan used it to further their influence among the Druze, but lost Qanawat to the Bani al-Atrash in the 1860s. The latter only nominally controlled Qanawat with the al-Hajari family running the village’s affairs independently through the mashaykhat al-aql. Main sights The city's extensive ancient ruins are 1500 m in length and 750 m in breadth. Among them are a Roman bridge and a rock-hewn theatre, with nine tiers of seats and an orchestra nineteen meters in diameter, also a nymphaeum, an aqueduct, and a large prostyle temple with portico and colonnades. North-west of the town is a late 2nd- or early 3rd-century peripteral temple, built on a high platform surrounded by a colonnade. For years, this temple was believed to honour Helios, but an inscription discovered in 2002 shows that it was dedicated to a local god, Rabbos. The monument known as Es-Serai (also Seraya, "palace") dates from around the 2nd century AD and was originally a temple, and then, from the 4th/5th centuries, a Christian basilica. It is 22 m long, and was preceded by an outside portico and an atrium