Baalbek, Baalbek, so good they named it thrice.
First came Baal, the God of rain and general fertility, and then Alexander decided to show just how Great he was by changing the name to Heliopolis, or Sun City, which the Romans kept, but its present name, Baalbek, dates from the final conquest, the Arab one.
One clumsy sentence cannot, of course, summarize the 3,000 years of history that moulded this city, let alone the 5,000 lost years before that, but it is convenient to divide its past into the Hellenic, Roman and Arab periods, and ignore brief Byzantine and Mongol interludes, and much else. With a history as long as Baalbek’s there’s a lot you have to ignore.
It is the Roman heritage that is paramount, and it is to the Roman ruins that tourists flock; or rather trickle, since there were a mere handful when I visited. Well, three handfuls actually, but nothing when you consider the crowds that swarm over Roman ruins in Italy.
Visitors are deterred, perhaps, by Hezbollah’s control of the region, since the very word ‘Hezbollah’ is so tainted in the west that no westerner dares travel within a hundred miles of the ‘Party of God’. It is one of the new bogeymen, a ‘here-be-dragons’ cartographic warning, a radioactive waste sign.
As to what Hezbollah really is, I cannot claim to know. The answer you receive depends upon whom you ask. The Shiite underclass and the Palestinian under-under class see them as heroes, valiant fighters of Zion’s imperialism and meritorious providers of education and health care to the disenfranchised. The Sunnis are more wary and the Christians, especially the Maronites, despise them — albeit silently, not wishing to take up arms against them again any time soon.
Hezbollah in Baalbek, and in much of Lebanon, are “ubiquitous but invisible”, as the New York Times puts it, but with the ever-present threat of assassination, it pays to keep a very low personal profile. In Baalbek their posters were everywhere and beside the Roman museum there is even a Hezbollah museum. However, when I tried to film the outside of it, several bearded men with AK47’s started shouting at me, so I made a hasty retreat and never went inside.
But everyone I spoke to felt the region to be perfectly safe to visit ‘at the moment’. The Israelis hadn’t bombed the place in nearly five years and the Syrian Army was almost fifty kilometres away. So off I went, travelling back in time to the ruins of Heliopolis, a city already older than my native Dublin at the birth of Christ.
I was looking forward to visiting a world that did not text, a world that measured history in millennia and not in microseconds. I wanted to see the past because I was growing weary of the present.
And did I find it? Well, let’s begin with the journey, which I always confuse with the destination.
Lebanon’s public transportation system leaves a lot to be desired. Take, for example, the ‘Central Transport Hub’, which is not Central, offers little in the way of mass Transport and is a Hub of nothing much.
Charles Helou Bus Station, to use its second name, is three stories high and was built under a bridge. It would be ugly enough if the top two floors were open, but squabbles between the government and private operators keep them closed, so all you are left with is the ground level, a disorganized dank and dismal mess into which buses and minibuses pull in, load up and pull out.
And if you think that’s bad then try Cola and Dora ‘stations’ in the East and West of Beirut, which mushroomed out of nothing in the Civil War, when Christians in the east and Muslims in the west of the city, united in their desire not to get shot trying to catch a bus, started to hunt rides at Cola and Dora intersections. Private operators were quick to offer a bare bones service and the ‘stations’ were born. I use the inverted commas around the word ‘station’ because even now they are just pieces of waste ground under bridges where minibuses congregate.
Before the War, Beirut was famed for the quality of its public transport, which has never recovered, and what stands in its place is a warning against the ugliness of unfettered private enterprise.
I got out of the taxi at what the taxi driver assured me was l’autogare de Cola. “Ou est le gare?” I asked, surprised to find a use for that piece of schoolboy French, but the taxi driver was already speeding away.
I squinted at the thirty-five degree sun to show my displeasure at its atomic furnace and searched for the Bus Station.
It was still nowhere to be seen, so instead I looked for signs of its effluent — the junkies, the homeless, and the flotsam of society, who will never inherit the Earth and have claimed bus and train stations in its place, but they too were nowhere to be found. For a moment, I assumed the taxi driver had deposited me in the wrong part of Selim Salam, or that I had mispronounced it entirely and been driven to Salem’s Lot instead.
But then an unshaven man with a football trapped inside his stomach approached me and shouted “Baalbek” in my ear. Assuming he had not mistaken me for someone of that name, I replied “Baalbek” and dressed my destination with a smile; and in return, I won his hand, which pointed me to a broken minivan.
“C’est ca?!” I asked, reverting to French, a language I spoke badly and he spoke not at all. To clarify matters, I pointed at the same four-wheeled rusting hulk of imperfections.
“Oui!” he replied, with an accent even stronger than mine, and in we climbed. My wife and I, that is, not me and the fat hairy man.
“A quell heure bus go?” I asked, hedging my bets by employing two languages.
“Oui!” he stated again, and then returned to shouting “Baalbek” at passers-by.
I felt like I was already travelling back in time. The minivan itself belonged to a different era and could well have appeared in early episodes of Scoobie Doo.
Once it had filled up, which is how the time of departure is determined, the driver ignited our chariot and off we sped, hurtling into the smoky highway, accelerating to infinity. Seven seconds later, we screeched to a halt, locked in a traffic jam.
Lurching out of Beirut, we headed upwards and onwards, but mainly upwards. The Lebanon Mountain Range is steep and my ears popped as the air cooled. Soon enough, we were at a thousand metres and climbing, swerving through winding roads in the clogged outskirts of Beirut, only narrowly missing the houses and apartment blocks clinging to the mountainside.
I looked behind me and the whole city lay at my feet. I tried to think of something poetic to say, something profound and insightful. Nothing happened. The muse did not arrive, perhaps left slightly sea-sick by the white-knuckle drops on the left side of the road and the millimetres of space thought sufficient by cars hurtling down the hills to our right. On the one side, a crumpled barrier and a fall into a ravine that would offer us a couple of seconds of free fall followed by an almighty splat; and on the other, the union of metal that is a high-speed car crash. If I were a muse, I’d stay well clear too.
So, I was left waiting, and then, as if in sympathy with my stalled imagination, the van came to a halt. We were off the road and reversing into something. I looked nervously at the other passengers, but they seemed perfectly relaxed, so I decided I should be calm too.
Hairy men with big muscles and deep voices opened the back of the van and started filling it with animal feed of some kind, and above that, fresh vegetables. They said something to me in Arabic and laughed and I laughed too. I’m like a chameleon, you know.
My eyes were then caught by some truly massive watermelons, which rested precariously just behind our heads. Being a worrier by nature, I wondered if they were hard enough to cause concussion or even death, should they fall onto us after a sudden halt. ‘Death by watermelon’ was not the end I had envisaged for myself.
Fully loaded — and almost certainly overloaded — with people and vegetables, the journey continued. The smell of animal feed started mixing with that of diesel, dancing a chemical cocktail, a nitrous samba, but above it all, the smell of fresh air streamed in through the opened windows. The fumes of Beirut were behind us and the mountains in front of us.
Soon we were
so high that we were passing through clouds. My pores closed and ceased to sweat. The hairs on my arm raised themselves to a standing ovation.
I was in Cloudland. As a child, living on the coast, I often wondered what it would be like to be inside clouds, and if you could dissolve into them, should you want to. “What’s happened to Phillip?” they would ask, in my imagination, and someone would reply, “Oh, he dissolved into a cloud”. The nearest I ever got to travelling through clouds in Dublin was walking home in the smog, and it wasn’t the same thing at all. It just made your snot black. But here I was, at last, fulfilling a childhood dream. I was ‘The Clouded Man’.
Behind the mist, bleak denuded mountains stood as testament to what happens when man is placed in charge of an environment. In Roman times, the mountains were covered in cedar forests, but cedar is a useful wood for shipbuilding, so over the centuries — or the millennia to be precise, as even the Egyptian pharaohs coveted the cedar forests — the woods were mined to exhaustion, and now only bare rock and a little topsoil bear witness to man’s enterprise. Spectral dandruff on a bed of Jurassic stone. Even goats, a scavenger of vegetation if ever there was one, are absent.
I wondered if our entire planet might one day look like this moonscape, as we prove the dictum that one cannot have one’s cake and eat it.
A surreal touch was added by the billboards we passed in the midst of all this nothingness. One advertised Elissa lingerie, through the use of an almost denuded female; and another proclaimed Beit Mist (a housing estate) to be “a piece of Heaven on Earth”. Heaven can’t be up to much, I thought, if it resembles a housing estate.
Everything that goes up, of course, must at some point, come down, and it was up there in Cloudland that I felt the inclines become declines. I was saddened to leave Cloudland, but all mournful thoughts vanished with the vaporous cumulus when I saw the Bekka Valley stretch out beneath me.
Firstly, valley is a misnomer, since it’s actually a plateau, lying a thousand metres high, sandwiched between the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon Mountain Ranges. The Bekka Valley is a northerly extension of the Great Rift Valley, which stretches from Africa to Syria, pulling east from west.
In Winter, both ranges are snow-covered, but in summer, the bleakness of the mountain ranges above stand in firm contrast to the fertility of the plateau below. This 150-kilometre long stretch of green and brown is noted today for the quality of its wines and the potency of its hashish, but just about anything that can be grown anywhere in the world can be grown here. The region is so fertile that even in the heydays of the Roman Empire, the Bekka Valley acted as one of the eternal city’s breadbaskets.
Our van descended and my ears popped again. And soon we were on the floor of the plateau, slicing its middle and passing through towns that I couldn’t pronounce, like Chtaura and Zhele.
Lebanon, as I’ve mentioned before, is small, but one only really appreciates just how small when one cuts through a plateau and can see both sides of the country through the windows. It is only fifty miles wide, so to my right I had the Anti-Lebanon Range and on the other side, Syria and the desert; and to my left, the Lebanon range, and beyond that, Beirut and the Mediterranean.
A couple of hours later and the Scoobie Doo Express deposited us safe and sound in Baalbek, and behind the rusting hulk of the van, the remains of the Roman world stood and waited for me.
I walked towards them.
The past waited.
And waited.
And.
I paid the gatekeeper and entered the temple complex. Then I climbed up steps that may or may not have been there for thousands of years and entered the city of the dead. The remains of the Roman world lay before me, baking in the early afternoon sun of the cloudless blue sky.
Of the three great temples that once proclaimed the power of Rome and the power of its Gods, and later the power of the Christian God, only the Temple of Bacchus is still extant.
It is approximate the same size as the Parthenon in the Athenian Acropolis, 66 metres long and 35 metres wide, but it is its height, 31 metres, that really impresses you, standing tall and erect after all this time, amongst the fallen ruins of the rest of the complex.
The survival of the Temple of Bacchus was not due to the primacy of pleasure but because the rubble from the other two temple monuments helped to protect it from the elements. Perhaps more importantly, the rubble of its big brother, the Temple of Jupiter, and its little sister, the Temple of Venus, also helped to protect it and from construction scavengers, who would simply cart off building blocks from ruins to fashion new buildings, which was a great deal less trouble that digging up rock themselves and fashioning it into building materials.
Much of the ancient world was destroyed this way. The Coliseum in Rome, for example, owes its dilapidated state not to invaders but to the Romans, who over the millennia have taken bits of it away to build their own houses with.
Sometimes this ‘architectural terrorism’ was state sponsored. The Temple of Jupiter, the mightiest of the Temples, is today only six Corinthian columns, supporting a single arch. There would have been more, had not the Byzantine Emperor Justinian scavenged the eight biggest pillars for the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. They are still there now, but support a different God.
What happened to the rest of the original 42 columns no-one knows.
What we do know is that the Temple Complex, which at its peak was the largest in the Roman Empire, was never finished, and as Rome began to decline, so Baalbek declined with it.
The Hexagonal Court was the last Roman structure added to the Temple complex and the year 250 AD would mark Baalbek’s zenith. After this, there was nothing but decline, plunder and gratuitous state vandalism.
I stood in the eight-sided Courtyard, turning this way and that, waiting for eight seconds at eight compass points, and then eight more and then eight more. I offered a sigh for the past and for the inevitable failure of all its ambitions. I offered another sigh for the present and saw in Baalbek a future, a possible future, for all our great metropolises may one day be nothing more than ruins, rocks and dust. And in two thousand years, some other traveller from some as yet unknown land may stand amongst them, offering a sigh for our failed ambitions. But our ambitions are so great and our appetites so large that there may be no-one left to sigh.
I looked to the past once more. Oddly enough, it was my namesake, the little-known Emperor Phillip the Arab, who added the hexagonal court, and it was under his reign that Baalbek was at its height. This would not save him, however, and Emperor Phillipus Augustus, the 33’rd Roman Emperor and Emperor during Rome’s millennium, would be assassinated by his own troops after only five years on the throne. Rome was tail spinning through little known and little loved emperors, and while the empire had not begun to crumble the rot was setting in.
I looked at the ruins and tried to imagine the past. Phillip the Arab was not available to help me create a picture of what the Baalbek would have looked like in its prime and I had no famous film scenes to aid my imagination, Hollywood having ignored Baalbek in favour of Rome, so I had to try to conjure up the image of the past inside my own head, but all around me was just rock, rock, rock. Nothing else remained.
I decided to go back slowly in time, swimming into the past. I began by imagining Kaiser Wilhelm’s visit here in 1898, the first big-name tourist.
In the museum, there were photos of him rambling about the ruins with his retinue, in the days before he came to be regarded as a demon with a funny moustache who buried the dreams of a scientific progress to Utopia in the slime of the trenches of World War I.
During his visit, parts of the Byzantine church still dominated the Great Court, but it has since been pulled down. It just wasn’t old enough. In fact, all the structures built after the Roman era, and there were many, have been removed to other locations in an effort to keep the ruins Roman. The past here is pure.
We walked around the Hexagonal Court’s edge, seeking the sha
de and admiring the pillars. Some stood high but supported nothing; others had fallen and crashed and their remains lay strewn hither and tither; others were gone entirely. Ruins stand as witnesses to the temporality of all things. How puny are all our struggles in the context of the eternal law of entropy.
“Earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes,” the Anglican Church tells us, at the end of life, in funereal solemnity. “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return,” Genesis warns us, at the beginning, in the first book of the bible. Matter cares little what uses we set it. We have always known this and it always makes us sad.
I went further back in time and jerked backwards to the earthquake of 1859, which took out three more of the pillars of the Temple of Jupiter; and then to Tamerlane, the Great Mongol ruler of just about everything, who sacked and looted his way through Baalbek in 1400, seven hundred years after the Arabs had ransacked the place. We build and we destroy.
Even Roman Heliopolis was built over the rubble of Phoenician temples, which in turn were constructed over the remains of those who came before them. All Gods are grafted onto their predecessors. Jupiter replaced Baal and Bacchus assumed the mantle of Dionysus. Gods evolve with our collective psyches.
I went further and further back and the Gods grew bloodthirsty. The courtyard became the locus in quo for the human sacrifices of the Phoenician and pre-Phoenician world.
For nine thousand years, humans have worshiped in Baalbek. They have prayed to and preyed for all manner of Gods. Where are these Gods now, and where are those who worshiped them?
If ghosts exist, then how crowded this complex of ruins must be! And if I could feel them, these nine millennia of ghosts, I could surely feel time itself. And if I could hear them, I could know the heart of man.
But if I could speak to them what would I say? How odd I would appear to them — I who worship nothing and no-one; I who pay tribute only to reason. I would tell them of the victory of western empiricism over superstition and ignorance. I would tell them of the rise of science. I would speak to them of equality, fraternity and the pursuit of happiness. I would show them medicine, cities of glass and the new world of the internet.
I would tell them to look on my works and despair. I would tell them that my civilisation is eternal.
And how would they reply? On the lone and level sand of the Hexagonal Court, the ghoulish denizens of the City of the Dead would embrace me, and laugh the laugh of the fallen.