There is much that is mysterious about the Phoenicians, and they have often been reproached by frustrated researchers “for having been so persistently silent about themselves and for having left no written history of their own. Everything we know about them comes from the annals of other races; they have only foreign advocates to plead their cause to posterity.”19
One of those foreign advocates was the Greek scholar Philo, who lived in Byblos in the first and second centuries AD—hence he is known as Philo of Byblos. His Phoenician History purported to be a translation of a book written by one Sanchuniathon, a Phoenician sage who had supposedly lived more than a thousand years earlier.20 Sanchuniathon’s writings have not come down to us in any other source. Moreover, like the works of the Babylonian priest Berossos, whom the reader will recall from earlier chapters, Philo’s own Phoenician History has also been lost. All that is left of it are fragments preserved as quotations and summaries by other authors—notably the fourth century Church Father Eusebius.21
In these fragments we read of the exploits of a “god” identified with the Greek deity Ouranos, whose name means “sky” or “heaven” and who:
invented betyls by devising stones endowed with life.22
There are a couple of points of interest here. First of all, obviously, we are back in the realm of betyls, those meteoritic “stones fallen from heaven” that are so often part of the debris stream of fragmenting comets and that were treated as cult objects throughout the ancient Near East. If we look into the etymology of the word betyl we find that it means “home of the god,”23 and the home of Ouranos is, of course, the sky, the right place for objects of meteoritic origin. Secondly, there is this curious reference to “stones endowed with life” which, significantly, is given in some translations as “stones that moved as having life.”24 In this I couldn’t help but be reminded of traditions from Ancient Egypt that spoke of huge stones being effortlessly moved around by “magicians” using “words of power.” For example, there is an account preserved on British Museum Papyrus No. 604 of the deeds of the magician Horus the Nubian, who:
made a vault of stone 200 cubits [300 feet] long and 50 cubits [75 feet] wide rise above the head of Pharaoh and his nobles … When Pharaoh looked up at the sky he opened his mouth in a great cry, together with the people who were in the court.25
Since 200 cubits by 50 cubits equates to approximately 100 meters by 25 meters (328 feet by 82 feet) it is obvious that any magician who could raise such a massive block would have no difficulty raising the megaliths of the Trilithon, which are less than a quarter of that size. At any rate, this thought of the magicians of the gods brings us back, by a circuitous route, to David Urquhart who tells us in his History and Diary what it was that led him to Baalbek in the mid-nineteenth century:
I was drawn thither by the Betylia [i.e. betyls], that mystery of the ancient writers … which I [believe] to have been Magnets used in the Phoenician vessels engaged in distant traffic, and which on the return of their fleets were conveyed in religious procession to the temple at Baalbek, to remain there until the fleets were again sent forth …26
Unfortunately Urquhart found no hints of the lost technology, “the magical, magnetic stones”27 he was looking for in Baalbek. “Where is the temple that held the Betylia?” he asked. “It has disappeared.” He deduced that “it must have stood upon the platform and was probably pulled down,” to make way for the Roman temples.28 He therefore contented himself with an inquiry into the mysteries of the Trilithon and of an even larger cut-stone block that his local informants showed him lying abandoned in the quarry half a mile to the south of the ruins. These ruins, he noted, when you imagined them without the later temples “now stuck on the top,” were “nothing but a quadrangular enclosure”:29
One can conceive the hewing out of enormous blocks for the statue of a king, the ornament of a palace, or the pomp of a temple, but here there is no such object; there is no conceivable object by which such an effort can be explained.30
This was one of a series of questions to which Urquhart could propose no answers of his own: first, why build with such huge blocks (beside which “Stonehenge is a nursery toy”); second, why build here, since Baalbek was not a great capital or a great port, but stood far inland; third, why was the work suddenly stopped, as evidenced by the block in the quarry and by the unfinished state of the U-shaped wall in which the Trilithon is set; and fourth, why was Baalbek unique?31
This structure is alone; there is nothing upon earth in the remotest degree resembling it.32
That night Urquhart dined with the Emir of Baalbek and asked him whom the huge U-shaped enclosure had been built by. The Emir replied in rather matter-of-fact tones that there had been three phases of construction. The megalithic work had been done at the command of two different rulers in the primeval period before the Flood:
And then came the Deluge. After that it was repaired by Solomon.33
When he was on his way back to Beirut, Urquhart reflected on what the Emir had told him, concluding that it touched on a fundamental truth and that “the stones of Baalbek had to be considered as some of those sturdy fellows who the Deluge could not sweep away.”34 More than that, it seemed to him that:
Before the Deluge the whole course of human society had been run … The builders of Baalbek must have been a people who had attained to the highest pinnacle of power and science; and this region must have been the center of their domain.35
Noah, after all, had mastered the science to build the Ark:
A vessel 450 feet long, 75 broad, and 45 deep … He therefore shared in the knowledge of these men of renown, and navigation must have attained in these antediluvian times to an extra-ordinary degree of perfection. For the building of the Ark we have only the authority of the Bible … The skeptic, on the other hand, who visits Baalbek, will cease to doubt that the men who could build into its walls stones of the weight of a three-decker with its guns on board, could construct a vessel of [such immense] dimensions. I assume that the Antediluvian origin of the one can no more be contested by the critic than that of the other by the believer. 36
Today, and rightly so, skeptics question everything that smacks of credulous superstition and easy belief. The traditions that so excited Urqhuart, however, are pervasive. Noah himself is said to be buried in the area, having returned there after the Flood to live out the remainder of his days.37 And according to Estfan El Douaihy, Maronite Patriarch of Lebanon from 1670 to 1704:
Baalbek is the most ancient building in the world … It was … peopled with giants who were punished for their iniquities by the Flood.38
Other traditions implicate demons in the placing of the megaliths,39 and an Arabic manuscript echoes the story Urquhart was told about an attempt to rebuild Baalbek after the Flood. In this account it was not Solomon but Nimrod, the great grandson of Noah, who sent giants to repair the damaged walls.40
Demons, giants, rollers, capstans, cranes … or aliens?
Looking up at the three massive blocks of the Trilithon, their bases more than 6 meters (20 feet) above ground level in Baalbek’s western wall, I can understand why they were believed to be the work of demons or giants. There is, indeed, something supernatural—something seemingly impossible—about them. Their lengths are respectively 19.60 meters (64 feet 3 inches), 19.30 meters (63 feet 3 inches) and 19.10 meters (62 feet 8 inches) and they’re all 4.34 meters (14 feet 3 inches) high and 3.65 meters (just a shade under 12 feet) wide.41 They are fitted in place so precisely that it is impossible to insert even the edge of a razor blade into the joints.
“Go figure” is all I can say!
But if you want the orthodox take on the subject read Jean-Pierre Adam’s 1977 paper, A propos du trilithon de Baalbek: Le transport et la mise en oeuvre des megaliths.42 It’s still the standard work of reference cited by all skeptics as though it proves their case, and it sets out a proposal deploying rollers of cedar wood, on which we are to envisage the blocks being placed.43 To pu
ll the blocks over the rollers Adam first considers, then (for logistical reasons) rejects, the use of a herd of 800 oxen.44
Finally, reasoning that weakness of human muscle power can be overcome by technical ingenuity, he settles on multiple arrays of pulleys rigged up to six capstans, each worked by a team of 24 men making a total of just 144 men to transport the blocks of the Trilithon, one by one, from the quarry half a mile (800 meters away) to the construction site.45 At the end of the journey, he calculates that 16 larger capstans, each worked by a team of 32 men (i.e. 512 men in total) would have been required to maneuver the blocks into their final position.46 The reason for the increased number of capstans and men at the end of the operation is that the wooden rollers would have to be removed, since obviously they could not be left in place in the wall. This would greatly increase the friction between the block and the surface over which it had to be dragged, but the deployment of some kind of lubricant would theoretically reduce the friction enough to avoid any need to lift the blocks—a problem that Adam believes the Romans would have preferred not to confront with blocks of this size.47
Friedrich Ragette has a slightly different orthodox solution to the challenge of moving and placing the megaliths of the Trilithon.48 In his case it does involve lifting the blocks at the end of the procedure, which he suggests would have been done using multiple “Lewis” devices (metal pieces fitted into specially cut holes in the stones above their center of mass, attached to chains or ropes and lifted by cranes or winches):
The 800-ton block of the Trilithon must have been moved into position by rollers. Then it had to be lifted slightly to allow the removal of the rollers before the tremendous load was lowered inch by inch. If we figure five tons lifting capacity per Lewis hole we would need 160 attachments to the stone.49
It is not my intention to offer a detailed critique here. I simply note in passing that there are some difficulties with Adam’s and Ragette’s proposals. Both, for example, rely on wooden rollers but calculations indicate that the stress of supporting the huge blocks would very quickly have crushed such rollers, even if they were cut from the strongest Lebanon cedar.50 Likewise, capstans are all very well and certainly multiply the “muscle power” that each man is able to exert, but there is a danger, which Adam recognizes, that unless massively anchored to the ground, it would be the capstans rather than the blocks that moved.51 Finally, every mason understands the principle of Lewis devices and how they work, but there is no sign on the Trilithon blocks of even a single Lewis hole, let alone of 160 on each of them.52
Both Adam and Ragette, and others who want to reassure us how unremarkable and unmysterious the whole achievement of the Trilithon is, like to preface their accounts with reference to large megaliths that were moved using known technologies in historical times. For example a 25 meter (82 feet) tall Egyptian obelisk, weighing 320 tons, was brought to Rome in the first century AD by the Emperor Caligula. Transporting it from Egypt and across the Mediterranean in a specially built ship was, itself, an incredible feat of engineering, logistics and heavy lifting. Then, much later—in the sixteenth century—the same obelisk was moved from where it had stood since Caligula’s time and re-erected in St. Peter’s Square on the orders of Pope Sixtus V.53 Likewise in Russia in the late eighteenth century the “Thunderstone,” a 1,250-ton block of granite, the base for an equestrian statue of Peter the Great that still stands in the city of Saint Petersburg, was hauled seven kilometers (4.3 miles) overland on a special moveable track of bronze spheres.54
Mind you, it’s one thing to drag a supersized megalith in a straight line over bronze ball-bearings, or to stand one up in the middle of a huge empty square, but it’s quite another to build a series of such megaliths into a wall that looks like a titan’s Lego project.
Still … let’s accept that it can be done, that similar things have been done, and of course—for the evidence is before our eyes—that it was done at Baalbek. The only question that matters, therefore, is whether it was the Romans who did it, or whether they, and the cultures that preceded them here going back 10,000 years or more, found the U-shaped megalithic wall already in place and fitted their own structures into its embrace.
That’s what it looks like to me.
The solid foundation rising above the plain at Baalbek that Daniel Lohmann identifies as pre-Roman and calls Podium 1, and on top of which the Temple of Jupiter was built, sits nicely inside the U-shaped wall which embraces it on its south, west and northern sides. At no point does the wall support the Temple of Jupiter. It is an entirely separate, exterior, structure.
I walk several times along the western wall, gazing up in stupefaction at the awesome megaliths of the Trilithon, trying to get to grips with what they mean. Regardless of whether it was the Romans or some unknown, antediluvian culture who put them here, what I’d like to know is why they put them 20 feet up? Why did they stack them on top of courses of smaller blocks, when surely the logic would have been to put the largest, heaviest blocks at ground level and add the smaller, lighter blocks above them. Why create the huge additional engineering and lifting challenge of doing it the other way round?
I walk along the wall. I’m counting blocks and courses. First of all, working upward from ground level, there are three courses of really quite small—let’s say 1.5 meters (about 5 feet) high, quarter ton—ashlars. On top of these are six much bigger blocks, very nicely finished (although also very heavily eroded) with the upper half trimmed in to be narrower than the base. These six blocks, which are more or less identical to blocks in the south wall that I described earlier (see Chapter Twelve), weigh about 400 tons each. Finally on top of them, come the three monster, 800-ton, blocks of the Trilithon.
I walk north now, to the corner of the west and the north walls. The northernmost block of the Trilithon doesn’t extend right to the end of the west wall. There’s a gap, filled up by an Arab defensive tower extending out from Podium 1 and built over the corner. But if I remove that tower in my mind’s eye, then I can see what’s going on, because on the other side of it is another huge row of megaliths forming the northern arm of the “U”-shaped wall—the row that I’d looked down on earlier from above (see Chapter Twelve); indeed the Arab defensive tower was the very one I stepped out on to get a proper view of this part of the megalithic wall, which is separated by a grassy gap 35 feet wide from the north wall of Podium 1.
I know archaeologists see the U-shaped wall as the base of the Temple of Jupiter’s grandiose but unfinished Podium 2. Lohmann makes a very good case for it being exactly that. But I’m still bothered by its non-load-bearing, purely cosmetic function, if that’s the case, and I can’t shake the feeling that it was a feature the Romans inherited from a much earlier time.
Where I do agree with the archaeologists, however, is that the even larger megaliths that I know are still in the quarry half a mile away, and that I’m going to take a look at as soon as I’m finished here, were definitely intended to sit on the top of the northern and southern arms of the U-shaped wall, thus raising them to the height that the western wall attained with the placement of the Trilithon. True, they are a bit longer and wider than the Trilithon blocks, but after trimming off the “boss” left to protect them on their journey from the quarry they would match exactly, fitting like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. This remains the case, whether the Romans made the U-shaped wall as part of Podium 2 or whether it was the work of the architects and masons of a lost civilization of prehistoric antiquity.
And there’s something else I agree with the archaeologists on.
Ideas put into circulation decades ago by “ancient astronaut” enthusiasts, notably Zecharia Sitchin in his book Stairway to Heaven, first published in 1980 (and in other later volumes of his Earth Chronicles series), cannot possibly be right. Whatever Baalbek is, and for whatever reason megaliths of 800 tons and more were used here, and whoever it was who put those megaliths in place, they definitely did not do so in order to create “a landing place for the a
ircraft of the gods.”55 Sitchin’s claim that the raised platform of Baalbek was “intended to support some extremely heavy weight” and that the heavy weight in question was a “rocket-like Flying Chamber,”56 could only have been made by a man who had no idea of the real appearance and layout of Baalbek itself, and could only be believed by others with no direct knowledge of the site.
The giant megalithic blocks of the Trilithon that seem to have convinced Sitchin the entire platform of Baalbek was megalithic all turn out to be parts of the U-shaped wall that embraces the (only modestly sized) Podium 1. And while an alien might conceivably land his spacecraft on even so modest a podium (if there were no other structure there) he certainly would not want to land it on top of a wall. It follows, therefore, that to use the megalithic character of the U-shaped wall to claim that a podium—which it is not even connected to, and does not support—was an alien “landing platform,” designed to bear extremely heavy weights, where “all landings and take offs of the Shuttlecraft had to be conducted”57 is either ignorant, or disingenuous or both.
Besides, even if the whole of the Baalbek complex was megalithic—which is not at all the case—we must ask ourselves why technologically advanced aliens capable of crossing the solar system in their spaceships would need such a platform to land on in the first place? If they could hop from planet to planet as Sitchin asks us to believe, wouldn’t their science be up to constructing something a little more high-tech and fit for purpose than that? In short, isn’t it obvious that Sitchin simply took 1970s NASA space technology as his template and projected it onto his imagined ancient astronauts?