Part VI
Stars
Chapter 14
The Gates of the Sun
Baalbek remains very much on my mind the next day as we drive the magnificent coastline around Jounieh Bay heading 38 kilometers (23.6 miles) north to Byblos, the ancient Phoenician port that claims, with some justification, to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. Archaeologists have established that it was occupied as early as 8800 BC,1 while Göbekli Tepe still functioned.2 By 5000 BC, Byblos was a flourishing, stable settlement that has never since been without human population.3 By 3000 BC, when it was known as Gubla or Gebel, it had grown to become the key port and city of the ancient Canaanite coast.4 It was the Greeks who later called it Byblos, when it served as the center of a lucrative papyrus trade with Egypt (bublos is the Greek word for papyrus).5 Likewise the reader will recall from Chapter Thirteen that “Phoenician” was the Greek name for the Canaanites and that the Phoenicians referred to themselves as Canaanites. For simplicity’s sake, I will continue to use the terms “Phoenician” and “Canaanite” interchangeably here and continue to refer to ancient Gubla/Gebel as Byblos.
As we pull into Byblos with its street cafés and palms and the bright Mediterranean lapping at its beautiful, crescent-shaped harbor, what’s on my mind about Baalbek is a question. Why didn’t the Romans choose to build the greatest and most spectacular temple in their entire empire in Rome itself? Or failing that, if for some reason they felt compelled to build the Temple of Jupiter in Lebanon, then why didn’t they build it in a prestigious and important entrepôt like Byblos? And if not in Byblos, then why not in another of the renowned Phoenician ports along the same coast such as Tire or Sidon?
Why Baalbek for the Temple of Jupiter? That’s the question. But there’s no easy answer, because archaeologists and historians admit that not a single shred of evidence exists “to tell us who commissioned, paid for, or designed any portion of the complex.”6 We can therefore only speculate as to their motives. It is really rather surprising when you consider the scale of the enterprise that no Emperor, no general and no architect ever claimed credit for it, but the fact is that the temple remained peculiarly absent from the annals of the Romans and of all other peoples for many centuries after it was built.7
Not until Macrobius, who wrote in the fifth century AD (by which time Baalbek had long been Christianized) do we even get a reference to the god who was worshipped there.8 It is almost as though a spell of silence was cast over the place by the magicians of a former age and that the Romans fell under its glamor, allowing themselves to be bound by it, even as they raised up the huge columns and pediments of their own temples. In consequence, as architectural historian Dell Upton observes, “ancient Baalbek is a figment of our imaginations.”9 Even the site itself, as we see it now, is in a sense a work of fantasy, since so much of it:
was reconstructed by a German archaeological mission in the early twentieth century and by French and Lebanese archaeologists in the 1930s, 1950s and 1960s. The rest we know from reconstruction drawings of the complex in a mythical state of completion.10
It is a continuation of this archaeological “myth-making,” I believe, that leads Daniel Lohmann to his paradoxical speculation that the builders of Roman Baalbek were “megalomaniacs” even though they were, in fact, so self-effacing that they never sought to associate themselves by name with any of the “giant strides toward monumentality” that they took there.11 The most gigantic of all these “megalomaniac” strides, of course, if Lohmann is right, was the unfinished attempt to give the Temple of Jupiter a purely cosmetic, non-load-bearing podium, rising—had it ever been completed—to around 50 feet high (dwarfing any other Roman temple podium) and made up of blocks weighing hundreds of tons and, in the case of the Trilithon, close to a thousand tons. In Lohmann’s reference frame, and the reference frame of every archaeologist for the past century, only megalomaniacs would contemplate such a task.
Since we’re all speculating, however, I offer the alternative speculation that the Romans chose Baalbek for the Temple of Jupiter—that it was such a special place to them—precisely because the U-shaped wall that Lohmann thinks was the base of their “megalomaniac” podium was already there, coming down from the time of the gods themselves and worthy of veneration in later ages purely in order to honor those ancient gods, rather than to exalt the names and stoke the egos of those who honored them.
Star worshippers
Overlooking the ruins of Phoenician and Roman temples, a castle from the Crusader period (twelfth century AD) is the dominant landmark in Byblos today. And interestingly this Crusader castle, reconstructed and repaired many times, has at least a dozen Roman column drums re-used as masonry blocks in its walls—a reminder that, in this region, you can never take any piece of architecture entirely at face value.
But the castle is a wonderful spot to get a sense of the old, indeed the truly ancient, city of Byblos, from which Phoenician seafarers once sailed out to all points of the known world and beyond—for the suggestion that the Phoenicians reached the Americas thousands of years before Columbus continues to be supported by intriguing though fragmentary evidence.12 There is also a mysterious connection with Ancient Egypt that goes far beyond the papyrus trade between these two ancient peoples.
This connection concerns the god Osiris, whose celestial image the Ancient Egyptians saw in the constellation of Orion. The father of Horus and the husband of Isis, the goddess of magic, Osiris was, according to tradition, a great king of primordial times, who offered the gifts of civilization to those who were willing to receive them.13 After weaning the indigenous peoples of Egypt:
from their miserable and barbarous manners, he taught them how to till the earth, and how to sow and reap crops, he formulated a code of laws for them, and made them worship the gods and perform service to them. He then left Egypt and traveled over the rest of the world teaching the various nations to do what his own subjects were doing. He forced no man to carry out his instructions, but by means of gentle persuasion and an appeal to their reason, he succeeded in inducing them to practice what he preached.14
The deeds of this great civilizing teacher as they are recorded in the Ancient Egyptian annals are, of course, reminiscent of the mission of those companies of gods, magicians and sages whom the Edfu Building Texts tell us “wandered the earth” in their great ships after the flood that destroyed their homeland, seeking to bring about the resurrection of the antediluvian world. And the antagonist, Set, who appears in the Edfu tradition and is eventually defeated and subdued by Horus, also plays a key role in the Osiris cycle of myths. He plots against the god-king while he is away on his civilizing mission and on his return he contrives to murder him with the help, significantly, of seventy-two co-conspirators.15 There is code here for, as the reader will recall, the number 72 is the heartbeat of the precessional cycle—the number of years required for one degree of precessional motion.
The body of Osiris, we are told, is placed in a sarcophagus by Set and the other conspirators and thrown in the Nile, whence the current carries it north and out into the Mediterranean sea. The waves carried the box to the coast of Lebanon:
and cast it up at Byblos, and as soon as it rested on the ground a large tree sprang up and, growing all around the box, enclosed it on every side. The King of Byblos marveled at the size of this tree and had it cut down and caused a pillar for his palace to be made of that portion of the trunk which contained the box.16
Discovering the whereabouts of her husband’s remains, Isis takes ship to Byblos, goes to the palace and contrives to have herself appointed as nursemaid to the children of the King. When unobserved she transforms into a swallow and flies round and round the pillar lamenting. Eventually she reveals her true identity and persuades the monarch to give her the pillar, from which she removes the sarcophagus containing the dead body of Osiris and returns with it to Egypt.17
What happens next is a long story, that we needn’t go into here, but
the upshot is the resurrection of Osiris in the heavens as the constellation of Orion where, as a star god, he reigns over the afterlife kingdom, his consort Isis by his side in the form of the bright star Sirius (called Sopdu or Sept in the Ancient Egyptian language, often rendered in Greek as Sothis).18 In one text, which makes these stellar identifications particularly clear, Isis speaks of Osiris as follows:
Thy sacred image, Orion in heaven, rises and sets every day; I am Sothis following after him, and I will not forsake him.19
And in the Pyramid Texts we read, among many similar utterances, that “Osiris has come as Orion.”20 Multiple other references also identify deceased pharaohs of Egypt with Osiris and with the stars of Orion and Sirius, for example:
O flesh of the King, do not decay … You shall reach the sky as Orion, your soul shall be as effective as Sothis …21
Likewise:
O King, the sky conceives you with Orion, the dawn light bears you with Orion. He who lives, lives by the command of the gods, and you live. You will regularly ascend with Orion from the eastern region of the sky, you will regularly descend with Orion into the western region of the sky.22
From such texts, notes Egyptologist Selim Hassan:
I think it cannot possibly be denied that, at one period in their history, the Egyptians believed that the souls of their Kings either mingled with the stars, or became a star … and this tradition never entirely died out. Moreover the association of the Giza Pyramids with the stellar cult was long maintained by tradition and those of Khufu and Khafre retained the reputation of being connected with star-worship as late as the Arab Period.23
In the same passage, Hassan then goes on to make an observation of the greatest relevance to my research. “In the Geographical Dictionary, Mo’gam-el-Buldan, by Yakut el-Hamawi,” he writes, “Vol. VIII, p. 457 (Cairo Edition)”:
it is said, after giving the dimensions of the two largest of the Giza Pyramids: “To both of them the Sabians made their pilgrimage.” Now, of course, these Sabians were star-worshippers, and if I guess rightly they had derived their name from the Egyptian word sba, “star.” The Sabians were followers of an ancient religion … worshippers of the hosts of Heaven, the heavenly bodies … Whatever the origin of their name may have been, the fact remains that they fully recognized the Pyramids of Khufu and Khafre as being monuments connected with the stellar cult, and revered them as places of pilgrimage.24
The connection Hassan makes here is a remarkable one, because the home city of the Sabians, since time immemorial, was Harran in southeastern Turkey,25 within a few miles of Göbekli Tepe. Moreover, as well as being “star-worshippers,” these Sabians of Harran were followers of the “Books of Thoth”—see Chapter Eleven—in which the Ancient Egyptian wisdom god had set down the “words of the Sages.” Indeed in Islamic times (for hundreds of years after the revelation of the Koran to the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century AD), the Sabians were able to win exemption from persecution at the hands of the Muslims by claiming not to be pagans but a “people of the book,” distinguished, like the Christians and Jews, by their possession of a divinely revealed Scripture.26 When asked to show their “book” they produced a copy of the Hermetic texts—the Greek and Latin writings purporting to be dialogues between Thoth (the Hermes of the Greeks, the Mercury of the Romans) and various of his pupils.27 It is noteworthy that Thoth, as well as being the god of wisdom, was also “Lord of the Moon,”28 and that the major temple of Harran was dedicated to the moon god of their own pantheon, whose name was Sin.29 Last but not least, Philo of Byblos tells us that Sanchuniathon, the source of his Phoenician History:
carefully searched out the works of Taautos. He did this since he realized that Taautos was the first person under the sun who thought of the invention of writing and who began to compose records, thereby laying the foundation, as it were, of learning. The Egyptians call him Thouth and the Alexandrians Thoth, and the Greeks translated his name as Hermes.30
We stay a few hours longer in Byblos. Excavations of the ancient city lie all around the Crusader castle. There’s a Roman colonnade, a small theater, Phoenician ramparts, the remains, little more than foundations, of the Temple of Baalat-Gebel, circa 2800 BC and dedicated to the Phoenician patron goddess of Byblos, and the so-called L-shaped temple, circa 2600 BC—a sacred lake once separated the two edifices. On top of a podium a number of small, crude obelisks still stand—the “Temple of the Obelisks,” circa 1900 to 1600 BC. There are the remains of the royal necropolis of the Kings of Byblos, circa eighteenth century BC down to tenth century BC, but mingled in with all this, very close to it, is the Neolithic quarter, dating back to 5000 BC and beyond, where the inhabitants of Byblos first started to make floors of crushed limestone around 4500 BC.31
All these ruins and remains are jumbled together promiscuously, one on top of the other, around one another, century upon century, millenium upon millenium, receding back into prehistory, very comprehensively picked clean by the archaeologists and left on show as tourist attractions. The site does not touch my heart and in the absence of Sanchuniathon’s original text, in the absence even of Philo’s History, other than in the fragments that have survived, I feel there’s nothing more of use that I can do here.
It’s time to move on.
Hill of pillars
It’s a short flight from Beirut to Istanbul and from Istanbul it’s only another short hop to the city of ŞanlIurfa, which Santha and I will use as our base for visiting Harran, the city of the mysterious “star-worshipping” Sabians, and for a return visit to Göbekli Tepe. Our first target, however, is neither of these places. Instead we seek out an as yet unexcavated site which shows every indication of being as old as Göbekli Tepe and which appears to have been dedicated to the same mysterious purpose. The name of this site, I’ve learned from my background research, is Karahan Tepe, but knowing its name is one thing; finding it is quite another.
It’s baking hot in southeastern Turkey in July. Our driver speaks English so there’s no problem communicating with him, and he in turn can communicate with others on our behalf, but nobody we pass as we drive through a landscape of irrigated fields and barren hills seems to have the faintest idea where Karahan Tepe is. Well, why should they, after all? It’s just another hill and by all accounts it’s in a fairly deserted spot. We do find it in the end, however, about 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) south of the main E90 highway and 65 kilometers (40.4 miles) east of ŞanlIurfa. That’s where we spot a little farmstead surrounded by low walls and poor fields at the end of a bumpy dirt track. The farmer points to a hill rising a few hundred meters to our north. It’s on his land, he says, but we’re welcome to take a look. He assigns his teenage son to show us how to drive our car as close as possible to the site, then we step out and go the rest of the way on foot.
The tepe is a ridge of limestone running roughly north to south with steep slopes, covered in loose crumbly soil, overgrown with yellow grass on its eastern and western flanks. The top of the ridge is about 705 meters (2,300 feet) above sea level, but the climb from where we’ve parked is only another 50 meters (164 feet) and almost immediately we start seeing the characteristic T-shapes of the pillars we’re familiar with from Göbekli Tepe. They are everywhere around the sides of the ridge, dozens of them, some organized in circles, others in what appear to be parallel rows, but all of them are quite deeply buried with only the distinctive tops of the “T” protruding above the ground.
Figure 45
Extraordinarily, other than confirming that Karahan Tepe is the same age as Göbekli Tepe, i.e. between 11,000 and 12,000 years old, and that it was abandoned at around the same time, i.e. around 10,200 years ago, after which it was never resettled,32 almost no archaeology has been done on the site at all. Local people, on the other hand, have been busy here looking for treasure and their efforts have exposed and broken a number of the pillars, two with serpents carved on them exactly in the manner that serpents are depicted on the pillars of Göbekli Tepe.
&nb
sp; Along the top of the ridge we find numerous semi-spherical depressions, like little craters, cut into the rock. Some have very clean, sharply defined edges that are typically about 30 centimeters (1 foot) in diameter and up to 15 centimeters (6 inches) deep—although there are also smaller and larger cupules present. In most cases they are grouped into arrays of a dozen or more, sometimes in rows, sometimes in circular or spiral patterns—but in such a random way that it is difficult to see the logic behind them.
As at Göbekli Tepe, it is clear that the quarrying of the pillars was done on site and we find a number of places where parallel grooves, marking out the shape of a pillar, have been cut into the bedrock of the ridge. There is one almost complete T-shaped pillar still in situ in the quarry that measures 4.5 meters (14 feet 10 inches) high, 1.5 meters (5 feet) wide and 80 centimeters (2 feet 7 inches) thick.33 Looking from that to the forest of pillars with only their heads protruding above the flanks of the hill, I can’t help but wonder what would be found here if a proper excavation was done. Göbekli Tepe has already rewritten the history of mankind and here is another Göbekli Tepe, pristine, practically untouched, and no one seems in the least bit interested. Indeed there is even a broken L-shaped fragment of a carefully cut block that once formed a complete square “window” or “porthole”—similar pieces have been found intact at Göbekli Tepe—that has been used here as part of the hearth for some shepherd’s fire and now sits blackened with smoke in a sheltered corner near the top of the ridge.
Magicians of the Gods Page 29
