[3] The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) Sector West headquarters, led by the contingent of the Italian army, are based on a neighbouring hill.

The preserved remains of a Roman-Byzantine village at the closeby archaeological site of Ermet Tell seem to support the local tradition which states that the hill was used as a mausoleum in the first century CE.

The exact date of the construction of the Maqam Shamoun Al Safa is unknown, but its minaret was reportedly built in the late 11th century, around the 1090s, shortly before the arrival of the Crusaders.

[9] In 1116, during the aftermath of the First Crusade, a Frankish army built a fortress over the Byzantine site in order to block access to the heavily fortified Tyre,[10] which was the last city in the region held by Islamic rulers.

It was eventually taken over by the Christian warriors in 1124, after a siege of almost six months had led to the negotiated surrender of Tyre by the Seljuk military leader Toghtekin.

[12] It is likewise unclear what happened to Shamaa Castle after the Crusaders surrendered Tyre in 1291 to the Mamluk Sultanate's army of Al-Ashraf Khalil, who had all fortifications of the city demolished to prevent the Franks from re-entrenching in the future.

In the 1596 tax-records it was named as a village, Sam'a, in the Ottoman nahiya (subdistrict) of Tibnin under the Liwa of Safad, with a population of 21 households, all Muslim.

The villagers paid a fixed tax rate of 25% on agricultural products, such as wheat, barley, fruit trees, goats and beehives, in addition to occasional revenues; a total of 1,920 akçe.

At that time, Sheikh Nasif al-Nassar of the Shiite Ali al-Saghir dynasty, which dominated Jabal Amel for altogether almost three centuries, established de facto autonomy over the area and the castle became the property of his family.

[3] This boom period ended, however, already after three decades in 1781, when al-Nassar was killed in a power struggle with the Ottoman governor of Sidon, Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar, who had the Shiite population decimated in brutal purges.

[20]In 1881, the PEF's Survey of Western Palestine (SWP) described Kulat Shema as "A modern-built castle, situated on a very high conical and conspicuous hill seen from a distance, and is occupied by about forty Moslems.

"[22] When the French physician, botanist, zoologist and Egyptologist Louis Lortet visited Shamaa around the same time, he could not find any information about the history of the fortress,[6] and likewise it remained obscure until the violent end of the 20th century.

[9] In late 1997, attacks by Amal and Hezbollah guerillas on Israeli forces and units of the pro-Israeli South Lebanon Army (SLA) militia in Chamaa were reported.