Toward the end of the Roman era bad things began to happen here. The turning point was Rome’s conversion, under the Emperor Constantine (AD 306–37), to the new fanatical, exclusivist religion of Christianity. The militants of that faith focused their beady eyes first on the Temple of Venus, described by the Christian chronicler Eusebius as “a school to learn sensual practices,” where initiates indulged “in all kinds of debauchery.”29 Constantine gave orders that the temple should be destroyed completely (in the event it wasn’t).30 Julian the Apostate (AD 361–3) detested Christianity and reinstated the old gods. Then Theodosius (AD 379–95) took the throne and the Christians were back in power with a vengeance. “Constantine the Great contented himself with closing the temples,” reports the Chronicon Paschale:
but Theodosius destroyed them. He transformed into a Christian Church the temple of Heliopolis, that of Baal-Helios, the Great Sun-Baal, the celebrated Trilithon.31
Some hundreds of years later the Islamic era began. Around AD 664 Baalbek was besieged and captured by a Muslim army that converted the Temple of Jupiter and the Temple of Bacchus, immediately south of it, into a single large fortress. Various factions then held Baalbek and continued to fortify it (indeed, to this day, it is often still referred to in Arabic as the Kala’a, meaning the “fortress”32). In the process, of course, the ancient temples suffered further destruction. In AD 902 the Karmates, a dissident Shia sect, besieged and captured Baalbek, slaughtering the defenders. The Fatimites seized it in AD 969. Four years later, a Muslim General named Zamithes arrived with a huge army and another devastating siege and massacre followed.33
A Greek-Christian army set Baalbek on fire in 996; by 1100 it was in the hands of the Seljuk, Tadj Eddolat Toutoush. In 1134 it was besieged by Zinki, who “for three months hurled on its ramparts a storm of projectiles” using “fourteen catapaults working day and night.”34
In 1158 Baalbek was struck by an earthquake of “unparalleled violence” that “destroyed the fortress and the temples.” Noureddin, the son of Zinki “hastened to Baalbek to repair the damage which the earthquake had done to the ramparts.”35
In 1171 a force of captured European Crusaders who were being held prisoner in the fortress staged an uprising, in which they slaughtered the garrison and took possession of the citadel, but were soon slaughtered in their turn by a Muslim army that broke in through an underground passage. In 1176 the Crusaders were back. They attacked and pillaged Baalbek. Soon afterward, in 1203 there was another massive earthquake that caused further extensive damage.36
In 1260 the Tartar Sultan, Holako, besieged Baalbek, captured it and destroyed it. “Not even the fortifications were spared”—a folly that the Tartars came to regret when King Daher Bibars attacked them and expelled them. He gave orders that the fortress of Baalbek—which, let us not forget, was the site of the ancient temples—should immediately be rebuilt and its walls reconstructed. In 1318, however, nature took a hand again and a fearsome flood undermined the ramparts making several wide breaches. “The water rushed in with such force that it lifted a tower 12 meters [39 feet] square to a distance of 400 meters [1,312 feet].”37
Next came the Turko–Mongol conqueror, Timur. In 1491, after capturing the citadel and subduing all resistance there, he gave it up “to the rapacity of his soldiers who pillaged it ruthlessly.” By 1516, when Baalbek became part of the Ottoman empire, the fortress and its temples were “completely ruined.”38
In this state they were seen by the English architect Robert Wood in 1751, whose detailed drawings of the site show nine of the original fifty-four columns of the Temple of Jupiter still intact. Then in 1759 another fearsome earthquake struck, leaving only the six standing columns that I now sit in front of as I mull over the tumultuous history of this ancient sacred place.39
The question I’m asking myself is this—after so many cycles of construction, destruction and rebuilding, how much can archaeology really claim to know about the site? As Michael Alouf, the former Curator of Baalbek, confirms:
Unfortunately this temple has suffered greatly through the ravages of time and the vandalism of the ignorant; its walls have been demolished, its columns overthrown and its foundations undermined. There only remain the six columns of the southern peristyle, four broken columns on their bases in the northern peristyle within the Arab fortifications, and the socles [plinths] of the peristyle of the façade. The Byzantine Emperors were the first who began to destroy the temple, using the building material thus obtained for the construction of [a] basilica. The Arabs followed their example, extracting from the walls and the foundations of the temple any blocks of stone likely to be useful in fortifying the weak spots of the ramparts.40
Undoubtedly the German Archaeological Institute, who have the concession for this site (as they have also for Göbekli Tepe in Turkey) are doing their best. In the process, however, they have revealed even more deeply confusing layers of complexity and have been obliged to overturn what was for a long while the mainstream consensus that the first builders at Baalbek were the Romans.41 Far from it! Indeed, under the place where I’m sitting now, which was in the midst of the area that once formed the cella—the inner chamber—of the Temple of Jupiter, are the remains of a far more ancient sacred mound. Such mounds are known as “Tells” in this region, and archaeologists now admit that “Tell Baalbek” goes back at least 10,000 years42—i.e. 8,000 or more years before the Romans arrived here! “A long sequence of Neolithic settlement layers … most probably the Pre-Pottery Neolithic,”43 has been excavated, pushing the origins of Baalbek very close to the time when Göbekli Tepe flourished in nearby Turkey.
Megalithic wall north
The artillery fire is still going on in the background, but it’s one of those noises you tune out after a while. I get up off the warm comfortable block I’ve been sitting on and make my way a few dozen paces north, across what would have been the floor of the Temple of Jupiter, until I come to its northern edge (marked by a few broken columns, still upright on their plinths like the stubs of rotten teeth) set into a later—very makeshift and higgledy-piggledy—Arab fortification wall. Into the wall, at intervals, are built embrasures with loop holes through which defenders fired arrows down on their attackers. Peering north through one of these loopholes, I can just see the top of a truly massive row of megaliths perhaps (I’m guessing) 20 or 25 feet below me. I count nine of them and note that they’re separated from the base of the wall in which the embrasure is set by a horizontal distance of—another rough guess—35 feet. In the gap, which is overgrown with grass and bushes, are many fallen, broken blocks of stone.
In order to get a better view of this strange megalithic wall I continue to walk westward along the northern margin of the Temple of Jupiter, until I get to another part of the Arab fortifications that were later added onto it, the so-called “Northwest Tower.” I can step out onto this—there’s a convenient terrace with a commanding view—and look back from it in an eastward direction along the huge megaliths, set out in a row below me, and down into the overgrown grassy gap that separates them from the wall of the temple platform.
Figure 43
I’ll not try to explain yet what those megaliths are. There are enough confusing factors already! But we’ll return to them shortly when, hopefully, all will become clear. Meanwhile I exit the Arab tower, walk back into the huge rectangular space it leads off, where the Temple of Jupiter once stood, and cross it heading east until I come to the steps that once led up to the temple’s entrance. I descend the steps, then turn westward again into the sunken plaza, bounded by the platform of the Temple of Jupiter to the north and by the Temple of Bacchus to the south.
The transmission of knowledge
Naturally I check out the wine god’s sanctuary. It’s beautiful, with a strong energy of its own, and I’m sure a lot of joy was celebrated here in antiquity. But there’s a more serious side, too, hinting that the Romans were the recipients of a stream of ancient knowledge and symbolism with its ori
gins in the remotest antiquity—a stream, though divided into many channels, that continues to flow to this day.
Freemasons who have studied the Temple of Bacchus point to a number of reliefs and designs here that are meaningful to them. For example, on the underside of a huge stone ceiling block, still balanced on the columns of the temple, appears the device known as the “Seal of Solomon”—a six-pointed star inscribed within a circle. According to leading US Freemason Timothy Hogan, Grand Master of the Knights Templar Order, the figure in the center of the star is depicted “giving a sign that would be familiar to Entered Apprentices.” Another relief shows two figures “sitting side by side and making gestures that would have meaning to a Fellowcraft in Freemasonry.”44
It’s also noteworthy at the Temple of Bacchus, and indeed throughout Baalbek, how much evidence there is for the veneration of the god of wisdom whom the Romans called Mercury—the Greek Hermes—whom the Ancient Egyptians knew as Thoth and connected, as we saw in Chapter Nine, to the traditions of the Seven Sages.45 Another curious link is that the cult of Mercury in its earliest forms involved the use of betyls,46 discussed in Chapter Eleven, which were originally “stones fallen from heaven”—in other words, meteorites and thus often part of the debris stream of fragmenting comets. When we recall that the Black Stone of the Ka’aba in Mecca is said to be a meteorite, it’s interesting that Baalbek in antiquity was the site of a famous oracle (the Roman Emperor Trajan reportedly held it in great esteem), and that it was “a black stone which answered questions.”47
Some scholars believe the Temple of Bacchus was jointly dedicated to Mercury,48 but since I’m not in Baalbek to explore Roman architecture I won’t describe it further. It’s the Temple of Jupiter, and its tangled prehistoric past that really interests me—particularly its relationship through the platform on which it stands with the earlier constructions going back to the time of Göbekli Tepe.
Again, sorting out the different phases is difficult and I’m determined not to be lured by the trap that so many “alternative” historians have fallen into—namely to conclude, when we see huge megaliths, that super-advanced, even “alien” technologies must have been involved in moving them and lifting them. As I’ve already said, I don’t dispute that the Romans could and did move enormous blocks of stone when they wanted to. Indeed, the evidence for that is all around me in the space between the Temple of Bacchus and the Temple of Jupiter, where heaps of carved and engraved blocks from the fallen pediments of both structures lie scattered. They are, without question, Roman, some of them weigh in the range of 100 tons or more, one weighs 360 tons,49 and all of them were raised almost 70 feet (21 meters) above the ground—the height of the columns on which they were perched.50
I walk north through these ruins, back toward the Temple of Jupiter, looking up now at its six remaining giant columns, each one of them composed of three enormous blocks and each standing on a monolithic stone plinth almost 9 feet (2.7 meters) high.51 You’d have to be a fool to argue that the Romans didn’t make and raise up those columns, or the pediments above them, because it’s completely obvious on stylistic grounds, and on the basis of comprehensive archaeological research, that they did.
However, as noted earlier, the Romans were themselves both the inheritors and the transmitters of sometimes extremely archaic traditions and it may not be an accident that the Temple of Jupiter originally boasted fifty-four columns. The reader will recall the phenomenon of precession discussed in Chapters Ten and Eleven, and the mystery of “precessional numbers,” encoded in ancient myths and traditions from all around the world, which Professors Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend take as proof of advanced astronomical knowledge handed down from some as yet unidentified and “almost unbelievable” ancestor civilization. It so happens that 54 is one of the sequence of precessional numbers. It derives from 72, the number of years required for one degree of precessional motion. We then add 36 (half of 72) to 72 itself to get 108 and divide 108 by two to get 54. In their groundbreaking study Hamlet’s Mill, Santillana and von Dechend point to the avenues of statues at Angkor in Cambodia, “108 per avenue, 54 on each side,” as examples of deliberate precessional symbolism52—so why not the fifty-four columns of the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbek as well?
Megalithic wall south
My eye tracks down from the top of the six remaining columns past their huge plinths, to the wall of moderate quarter-ton blocks that they surmount (forming the southern edge of the Temple of Jupiter) and down again to the base of that wall which in turn is flanked by a row of nine colossal megaliths that are each about 32 feet long, 13 feet high and 10 feet wide (9.5 meters by 4 meters by 3 meters).53 These monster blocks weigh somewhere in the range of 400 tons each. A number of them, those furthest toward the west, have a nicely finished appearance, with the stone smoothed and polished and the upper half trimmed in to be narrower than the base. But others are rough, still showing the “boss,” the protective layer that masons leave on the surface to protect the ashlar from damage while it is being transported to the site.54
The quarry these blocks were brought from has been identified. It’s about 800 meters (half a mile) to the south. I don’t doubt that cutting and moving them would have been within the technical capacity of the Romans, the greatest and most ingenious builders of the historical antiquity. Still the question must be asked—are these blocks their work? Or someone else’s? The question must be asked, because the nine blocks I’m looking at now are part of the same stupendous, megalithic wall to which belong the nine equally gigantic blocks I saw earlier on the north side of the complex. That northern row of megaliths and this southern row of megaliths form the northern and southern “arms” of a single gigantic “U”-shaped wall that surrounds the Temple of Jupiter to the north, south and west with the base of the “U”—in which is set the fabled Trilithon that I’ve come here to see—oriented west.
As usual with Baalbek, as though this were not complicated enough, there are further complications! These have been explored by Daniel Lohmann, an extremely thorough and really quite brilliant German architect and archaeologist, who has spent years excavating and closely examining this site and who, in February 2015, was gracious enough to engage in correspondence with me and to give me the benefit of his extensive knowledge. It’s his opinion, which I’ll go into in more depth in the next chapter, that the awe-inspiring U-shaped megalithic wall surrounding the Temple of Jupiter is one hundred percent Roman.
His case is that it was part of what was intended to become an immense podium—let us follow the logic of his argument and call it “Podium 2”—with which whoever commissioned the temple (and since there are zero contemporary records we don’t know who that was55) wished to surround his “megalomaniac” masterpiece.56 The upshot of Lohmann’s investigation is that within the U-shaped wall of Podium 2 are the remains of what he sees as an earlier building phase, which he refers to as “Podium 1.”57 His investigations show the dimensions of Podium 1 to be 12 meters (39 feet) in height by 48 meters (157 feet)north to south, by 95 meters (312 feet) east to west, but, he admits, “the only certain clue” to its age “is that it pre-dates the Julio Claudian temple”58 (i.e. the Temple of Jupiter which was built in the main by the Julio-Claudian dynasty, spanning the reigns of the Emperors Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, 27 BC–AD 68). To cut a long story short, Lohmann argues that Podium 1 was the work of Herod the Great, the Roman client king who ruled Judea in the last decades of the first century BC. But there are no inscriptions or other documentary evidence that could settle the matter, so “the only source of information is the well-preserved structure itself,”59 notably its stylistic features:
such as the use of alternating rows of headers and stretchers, drafted-margin masonry and the reconstruction of the plan of this early structure. These elements reveal surprisingly close parallels to Herodian sanctuaries, and in particular the Temple at Jerusalem, not only in general appearance but in their precise proportions and
measurements. These correspondences between the two building projects strongly suggest Herodian involvement … even though its precise nature remains to be determined.60
As we’ve seen, the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70, so Lohmann is obliged to base his argument on “the only surviving part of the Temple, the gigantic trapezoidal platform of the Haram-esh-Sharif.”61 Nonetheless, the detailed comparisons he offers do, indeed, make an excellent case for “Herodian involvement” in Baalbek’s Podium 1. What remains to be settled, however, is how extensive this involvement was. To be specific, although Lohmann concedes that “Tell Baalbek … was continuously inhabited since the pre-pottery Neolithic period”62—i.e. since the time of Göbekli Tepe—and although his whole argument is that the Julio-Claudian Emperors worked around Podium 1 at Baalbek when they started to build the massive and imposing U-shaped wall for Podium 2, he doesn’t consider the possibility that there might have been a “Podium 0,” which Herod in turn overbuilt.
I can hardly blame him for that, since no mainstream archaeologist that I’m aware of is willing to consider the same possibility for Herod’s restoration of the Jerusualem Temple—particularly with reference to the huge megalithic blocks, discussed earlier, that now stand exposed by the Hasmonean Tunnel. Nevertheless it’s a possibility that shouldn’t be ignored at Baalbek, especially in the light of what Lohmann himself describes as the “great antiquity” of the site.63
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