Magicians of the Gods
By Graham Hancock
Chapter 13
And Then Came the Deluge
I’d hoped, I’d expected, I was almost sure, that the course I’d charted through the ruins would lead me
to the Trilithon, but still I feel a minor sense of triumph that my wanderings in the labyrinth have
actually brought me to this very special place!
It’s a good moment to take stock. That single course of outer-fortification masonry to my west
barely covers a quarter of the Trilithon’s immense width. There’s part of the drum of a fallen column
lying just by the gap in the fortifications that overlooks the grassy border within the perimeter fence
surrounding the ruins. Pressed against the fortification wall this column covers approximately half the
width of the huge megalith it rests on, the southernmost of the three in the Trilithon. All in all this is a
sheltered spot, a quiet space, a little courtyard almost. Conveniently there’s a loose block about the
height of a stool for me to perch on, and what’s more, since it’s afternoon now, there’s a patch of
shade.
With a sigh of relief I sit down, haul out my notebook and compose my thoughts. I’m aware, as I do
so, that my feet are placed not only on the Trilithon block, but also on something inscribed into it that
effectively proves it is older than the Temple of Jupiter, though not how much older. The shade is
working against me, the fifty years since it was first brought to light have not been kind to it, and
honestly I can’t see it. However, Professor Haroutune Kalayan, the engineer placed in charge of the
restorations of Baalbek by the Lebanese Department of Antiquities, explains that back in the mid1960s, “In view of the scientific interest, Emir Maurice Chehab, Director General of the Antiquity
Department, decided to have the top of the Trilithon cleared…”
When this was done:
The south block … exposed a full-scale orthographic drawing of the pediment of the Temple of
Jupiter. The drawing partly extends under Roman construction and partly it is hidden under an
early period Arabic construction … This … discovery suggests that the Trilithon was already
in place to serve as a trestle board for the dimensioning and ordering of the pediment blocks;
that is, in the beginning of the second half of the first century AD. Further, it can be concluded
that after the construction of the pediment, after the drawing had served its purpose, the
constructional scheme above the level of the Trilithon [was] executed; this is why part of the
drawings extend under the Roman constructions.
1
So right here, at my feet, unfortunately invisible now without special lighting, is a convincing piece of
evidence that a real mystery, not just one made up by alternative historians, surrounds the Trilithon.
Obviously, since it was used for an architectural drawing of part of the Temple of Jupiter, as Kalayan
admits, and particularly so since it was afterward partially covered by Roman construction, the only
logical deduction is that it must be older than the temple.
We’ll look further into the implications of this, but it should be noted right at the outset that Daniel
Lohmann doesn’t agree. Presenting a paper for the Proceedings of the Third International Congress on
Constructional History, held in the German city of Cottbus, in May 2009, he argued:
Kalayan suggested that this drawing proves the Trilithon to be older and already in place when
the temple was built. Today, new indications show that this assumption is outdated, and that the
Trilithon and temple were built synchronous. The upper surface of this block [the southernmost
Trilithon block with the drawing on it] was practically used for a simultaneous construction,
later simply to be covered by the next stone course.
2
And in a follow-up paper in 2010, Lohmann expanded on his reasoning:
The unfinished pre-Roman sanctuary construction [Podium 1] was incorporated into a master
plan of monumentalization. Apparently challenged by the already huge pre-Roman construction,
the early imperial Jupiter sanctuary shows both an architectural megalomaniac design and
construction technique in the first half of the first century AD. The most famous example may be
the Trilithon forming the middle layer of the western temple podium … The podium can be
considered as an attempt to hide the older, inconveniently shaped temple terrace behind a
podium in fashionable Roman manner …3
I understand Lohmann’s logic but I have a number of problems with it. First and foremost there is the
very concept of a “podium” that is being bandied around here. The dictionary defines “podium” as:
the masonry supporting a classical temple.
4
Or, alternatively:
a stereobate for a classical temple, especially one with perpendicular sides.
5
A “stereobate” in turn is defined as:
the foundation or base upon which a building or the like is erected.
6
Or, alternatively:
the solid foundation forming the floor and substructure of a classical temple; crepidoma;
podium.
7
A “crepidoma,” likewise, is “the platform on which the superstructure of the building is erected.”
8
What all these definitions hold in common is the notion that a podium is a structure on top of which
a temple is built. But this is not the case with Lohmann’s Podium 2. It is not the “foundation or base”
upon which the Temple of Jupiter is erected, it is not the “solid foundation forming the floor” of the
Temple of Jupiter, and it is not “the masonry supporting” the Temple of Jupiter. What the Temple of
Jupiter in fact stands on, and is “supported” by, as Lohmann himself makes clear, is the Herodian
Podium 1. Lohmann’s Podium 2, it turns out, does not “support” any part of the Temple of Jupiter. It
surrounds Podium 1 on three sides but it does not support it. It is, in other words, as I described it
several times in Chapter Twelve, a U-shaped megalithic wall; but it is not a podium. If the Romans
built it, as Lohmann believes, then they did not build it to serve any structural, load-bearing, podiumlike purposes but purely for cosmetic reasons—“as an attempt,” to repeat his own words, “to hide the
older, inconveniently shaped temple terrace behind a podium in fashionable Roman manner.”
In response I can only repeat that “podium” continues to be a misleading term, which does not
describe what we actually see on the ground. If Lohmann’s analysis of the pre-existing Herodian
works is right, then we don’t see evidence of the Romans hiding “the older, inconveniently shaped
temple terrace” behind a fashionable Roman “podium.” Whatever plans they may have had for
extension and development, which we cannot know and which there are no records of whatsoever, the
evidence on the ground is limited to that massive U-shaped enclosure wall surrounding Podium 1 on
three sides but not supporting it—a profoundly megalithic wall, larger in every dimension than any
other that the Romans are known to have built anywhere in the world.
A wall that doesn’t even look Roman, incorporating blocks weighing more than 800 tons—the
Trilithon—that would have required truly spectacular efforts to move and put into place.
I’m not saying that the Romans weren’t equal to such efforts, or that 800-ton blocks were beyond
the limits of their building technology. I don’t know, and don’t claim to know, the limits of their
technology. What I’m saying is that it is quite unlike the practical, phlegmatic cast of mind of the
Romans, which Lohmann recognizes,
9
to go to such extreme lengths for purely cosmetic purposes.
Surely, therefore, there is room to consider an alternative possibility, namely that the megalithic U shaped wall was already in place long before—perhaps even thousands of years before—Podium 1
was built?
But in the very paper in which Kalayan asserts that the Trilithon predates the Temple of Jupiter he
goes on to give another crucial piece of information that seems to pour cold water on speculation of
this sort. Yes, the Trilithon is older than the superstructure of the Temple of Jupiter, but not much
older, because:
A part of a drum of a column similar in dimension to the columns of the Temple of Jupiter is
used as a block in the foundation under the Trilithon. In the absence (to our knowledge) of a
second monument with similar dimensions of columns in Baalbek, one can conclude that the
drum was a discarded one and that the columns were already cut, or were in process of shaping
when the foundations of the Trilithon had started.
10
Is this the “ugly little fact that destroys a beautiful theory?” Is my quest for a lost civilization at
Baalbek fatally compromised by Kalayan’s column drum? Might I just as well pack up and go home?
You would think so from the skeptical literature on this subject, which endlessly regurgitates the
paragraph quoted above as though it settles the matter once and for all, as though it proves beyond
reasonable doubt that the Trilithon is the work of the Romans—as though any further thought and
questioning on the matter is spurious, pseudo-scientific hogwash.
Skeptical author and self-styled “debunker of fringe science and revisionist history” Jason
Colavito, for example, claims that “archaeology and engineering can explain all the individual
aspects of the Trilithon” and that there is therefore no need for an alternative perspective.
11 Rather
than do the work to back up this assertion himself, however, he refers us to the “wonderful” writings
of another self-styled “skeptic,” physicist Aaron Adair.
12 Adair in turn simply rehashes Kalayan’s
arguments, placing heavy reliance on the column drum in the foundations, and on the architectural
drawing on top of the southernmost Trilithon block, to conclude:
we can be reasonably certain that the Trilithon stones were put into place contemporaneously
with the construction of the Temple of Jupiter. So already, by having the Trilithon stones
contemporaneous with the temple we have established the Roman provenance of the structure.
13
It all sounds reasonable, wholesome and convincing. But actually, like so much else in the skeptical
literature that is passed off as fact, it turns out, on close scrutiny, to be speculation, opinion and bias
masquerading as objectivity. That column drum, that Kalayan mentioned in passing, and that so many
others have relied upon absolutely to reinforce established ideas about the chronology of the site, is
much—much!—less than it seems.
Ironically, the central problem that I’m coming to here is illustrated by Adair himself in a black
and white photograph of the western wall of the sanctuary (apparently taken from a very old postcard)
that he reproduces with his article to support his argument—namely that there are blocks below the
Trilithon, and that below these blocks, out of sight in the photo, is Kalayan’s column drum. But what
the photograph shows in the wall above the Trilithon is a section of a different Roman column drum
that was redeployed by the Arabs during one of the many occasions when we know they repaired
fortress Baalbek, after it had been attacked and pounded by enemy catapults.
14 Moreover, as though to
underline the impermanence of every redeployable feature in the walls of Baalbek, even that bit of
column drum (which can also be seen in a photograph “taken before the First World War” and
reproduced in 1980 by Friedrich Ragette
15
) was removed in more recent restorations—as Santha
Faiia’s images from 2014 in the plates section show.
194s
Indeed the Arabs regularly and routinely cannibalized, reused and repurposed Roman column
drums and parts of column drums.
16 Moreover, as we saw in Chapter Twelve, and as Michael Alouf,
a man who knew the ruins intimately for more than fifty years, confirms, the foundations of Baalbek
were repeatedly undermined during the numerous sieges that the sanctuary suffered while it served as
a fortress.
17 After the sieges the foundations were naturally repaired (otherwise whole sections of
wall would have collapsed) and it is my view that this, rather than original Roman construction, is the
most plausible explanation for the column drum found in the foundations beneath the Trilithon. Why,
after all, if the Romans made these foundations, as the orthodox theory requires us to accept, would
they have suddenly used a column drum at this point, when they would surely have had plenty of
regular blocks, specifically cut and dressed for the purpose, at their disposal?
It simply doesn’t make sense. But Arab masons repairing an undermined foundation would have
used whatever lay at hand and the centuries of warfare, earthquakes and other disasters that Baalbek
suffered meant that there were enormous quantities of broken columns lying around, as there still are
to this day. There is also another possibility, which is that the Romans did, in fact, put the column
drum into the wall—but again as a repair, rather than as an act of original construction. If the
megalithic wall was already very ancient when the Romans came on the scene, and if it was their
intention to use it as a base for further construction, they would undoubtedly have surveyed the
foundations and repaired any sectors that the years had not been kind to.
I scrawl “FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THAT COLUMN DRUM” across a page of my notebook.
The matter isn’t closed yet—one way or the other—but the hypothesis that the Romans were not the
original builders of the U-shaped megalithic wall of which the Trilithon is an integral part, continues
to look viable to me, and worthy of further investigation.
It’s time to see the Trilithon from the outside. I leave my welcome patch of shade, poke around a
little longer on the top of the giant blocks and then retrace my steps eastward through the Temple of
Jupiter complex. Eventually—it’s a long walk—I find my way back to the main entrance of the site,
pass through the propylaea and down the main stairs, turn right and follow the path that runs parallel to
the southern exterior wall of the fortress the Arabs made of this place. The Temple of Venus comes
into view a few hundred yards southeast of the main ruins. It’s beautiful, but irrelevant to my
purposes, so I ignore it and press on toward the southwest, passing two more Arab towers built into
the fortification walls and eventually coming to a gateway in the fence through which I can see the
Trilithon in the distance.
A guard is there. He makes a great show of keeping me out, but money changes hands, the gate is
opened with a flourish, and I’m on my way through an orchard of shriveled trees to get a better look at
the three largest blocks ever used in any construction anywhere in the world …
“The highest pinnacle of power and science…”
In the nineteenth century David Urquhart, a learned Scotsman, traveled widely in Lebanon, eventually
publishing his History and Diary in 1860. He never explained where he got the hint from, but it was
his belief that Baalbek had played an important part in the secretive maritime empire of the
Phoenicians, whose exploits started to be remarked upon by other cultures in the second millenium BC
and who were descended from the original Canaanite people of this region. Indeed the Phoenicians
usually referred to themselves as Canaanites.
18 Renowned for their seafaring abilities, and especially
for their uncanny—or perhaps one should say instead, precise and scientific—navigational skills,
they established ports all around the coasts of the Mediterranean as far afield as Tunisia, Morocco,
Spain, Italy, Turkey, Cyprus and Malta. Their heartland was in Lebanon, however, and their first city
was Byblos, to the north of modern Beirut, with other important centers at Tire and Sidon.
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 extraordinary 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 pull 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 aircraft 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?
I knew Zecharia Sitchin personally, had a few dinners with him in New York and once drove him
from Stonehenge to London when he was on a visit to England. I liked him well enough, and I think he
did some good research, but on Baalbek at least I have no doubt now—after exploring the site myself
—that his whole “landing platform” thesis is fundamentally flawed. This is not to say, however, that
every idea set out in his books was equally compromised. The Mesopotamian cuneiform texts, which
he could not read and translate as he claimed (his “translations” were adapted and to some extent
“fictionalized” from the work of mainstream scholars) do in fact contain material of the greatest
interest, and I think he was right to notice hints of high technology in them.
But were those technologies “alien” or human? This is a question we’ll return to in Chapter
Sixteen, when we’ll consider what is known about certain powerful beings referred to in Biblical and
other ancient texts as “the Nephilim” and “the Watchers.”
The biggest cut stone block in the world
“I have found that archaeologists are seldom receptive to the notion of ancient astronauts,” wrote Elif
Batuman in an article about Baalbek in the New Yorker on December 18, 2014, “although one could
argue that, when the archaeologists went looking for answers, all they managed to find was an even
bigger and more mysterious block.”
58
Indeed so! In June 2014, just a month before I arrived in Baalbek, the German Archaeological
Institute made a stunning discovery in the quarries half a mile south of the Temple of Jupiter. There, it
had long been known, lay two giant megaliths that are heavier, by a significant margin, than any of the
stones in the Trilithon. What no one had suspected, however, despite a century of rather intensive
investigations around Baalbek, was that a third immense block lay buried and hidden from view
under the sediment that has accumulated in the quarry over the millennia. The archaeologists chose
not to announce their discovery to the world until late November 2014, but since they had excavated
it in June, it lay there in full view when I first visited the quarry on July 10 and a local shopkeeper—
who claimed that the discovery was in fact his and that the Germans had merely appropriated it—
made a point of drawing it to my attention.
The quarry is in two parts, divided by a road, and in the first area you come to as you approach
from the direction of the temples lies the famous “Stone of the Pregnant Woman,” also known as the
“Stone of the South,” which has been decorating postcards from Baalbek for a hundred years and was
known to travelers like David Urquhart long before that. It measures 21.5 meters (almost 71 feet) in
length, 4.2 meters (just under 14 feet) in height, and 4.3 meters (just over 14 feet) in width. It weighs
970 tons.
59 Across the road a second even bigger megalith, which had lain undiscovered since time
immemorial, was unearthed in the 1990s. It measures 20.5 meters (just over 67 feet) in length, 4.56
meters wide (almost 15 feet) and 4.5 (14 feet 9 inches) meters high; its weight has been calculated to
be 1,242 tons.
60 But the megalith that was discovered in June 2014 has a mass greater than either of
these, measuring 19.6 meters (64 feet 4 inches) long, 6 meters (19 feet 9 inches) wide, and 5.5 meters
(18 feet) high, with an estimated weight of 1,650 tons.
61
It was this newly excavated megalith, the single largest block of stone ever quarried in the ancient
world, that the excited shopkeeper proudly pointed out to me during my visit. Its upper surface is less
than two meters (6 feet 7 inches) below the lower edge of the Stone of the Pregnant Woman, which it
lies immediately beside and parallel to. And, like the Stone of the Pregnant Woman, it is beautifully
cut and shaped, ready, after removal of the “boss,” to go straight into the U-shaped wall for which all
three giant blocks were undoubtedly intended.
I spend some hours clambering around these weird, otherworldly blocks. I feel as though I’m
mountaineering. The scale is so immense, and in a way so “alien,” that a curious detachment from
everyday reality sets in and I lose all track of time. I note that the Stone of the Pregnant Woman
appears to have been sliced through at the base, where it emerges from the bedrock, with a clean
straight cut. How was that done? And no matter where I stand—above, below, beside—I am dwarfed
by this monstrous product of ancient and unknowable minds. The very thought that someone, in some
distant epoch, could conceive of this, could cut it out and shape it entire and then, at the end, just
leave it here, abandon it, forget about it, is incomprehensible to me. The closer I examine it, the more
details I observe of the precision of the workmanship, of the scale of the enterprise, and of the will
and imagination that went into its creation, the more certain I become that it and its fellows here in the
quarries, and the Trilithon, and the other giant megaliths of Baalbek, were not the work of the
Romans.
I know how profoundly Daniel Lohmann disagrees! A few months later, in February 2015, he and I
will correspond at some length over several days. He will graciously answer many questions and
help me to understand some of the complexities of Baalbek that escaped me when I was there. He’ll
make an excellent case for the Roman provenance of the whole vast scheme. He will even send me a
photograph of the column drum built into the foundations of the Trilithon wall and he’ll write:
In my recent work I located this column drum fragment, excavated it anew, and measured it
millimeter precise to determine the drum diameter. I looked at the surface structure and masons
dressing in comparison with the Jupiter temple columns and the lithology. All indications are
exactly the same as the column drums of the Roman Jupiter temple. The fragment was neatly
dressed at the edges to make a masonry ashlar out of it, and it received the beautifully sharply
cut edges that all ashlars of the Roman Jupiter Temple phase have (including the megaliths).
62
My reply:
First of all, to be absolutely clear, I don’t dispute that this fragment is from a column drum of
the Roman Jupiter Temple. Clearly it is. And I don’t dispute the generally agreed dating of the
columns of the Roman Jupiter Temple. But this fragment is a very important part of the
(formidable!) edifice of logic you and your colleagues use to establish the chronology of the
Trilithon, and that many others have relied upon when reporting that chronology. What I’d like
to interrogate a little further, therefore, is your level of certainty that this column drum fragment
was put there at the same time as the original construction of the western wall. It’s nicely cut
and shaped, I agree, but still it sticks out like a sore thumb (especially now I see it cleared in
the photo you kindly sent me). It looks intrusive, odd and awkward—very different from the
rest of the blocks in this course. In short I think the argument can be made that it is more likely
to be a later repair of the wall than it is to be an integral part of the original wall. Lending some
support to this argument is that we know the Arabs were constantly repairing the walls around
the whole site, and sometimes using column drums to do so, so why shouldn’t this be just one
more of those repairs? What is the absolutely compelling archaeological evidence that
completely, effectively and once and for all rules this possibility out? I’d be most grateful if
you could address that specific point in your reply.
63
Lohmann comes right back at me on this:
The fragment is just one of the indications that shows the synchronicity of the megalith podium
and the temple, which was not our result, but known to science for over one hundred years—
and at latest since the excavations by the German team of 1900–1904. Yes, it sticks out. But no
—not unlike the others. The builders of the temple were rather pragmatic: once the structure
was to be hidden underneath the soil or behind something else, they didn’t bother to flatten the
surfaces or make it look nice … What was important first when building is that the ashlar was
perfectly flattened on the top and bottom, and then the two sides, in order to create a solid and
stable wall—and that was done on the column drum exactly in the same Roman manner as it
was done on the blocks around it. If you look at the length of the fragment, and imagine a hole in
the wall instead, the two smaller ashlars in the course above would fall, causing further
instability for the structures above. Here, frictional connection/force closure (translations of
kraftschluss from my dictionary—language barriers!) is needed, you can’t just replace an
ashlar in a row of “stretchers.” Secondly, Arab repairs of Roman walls look a lot different:
they used smaller blocks instead, and would never have been able to squeeze a block in so
tightly … Medieval repairs never have such tight joints. It’s a comparison of precision that
makes an engineer like me 100% certain.
64
After examining our own photographs of the Trilithon wall—Santha took a great many while we were
there—I find myself unpersuaded by Lohmann’s argument. First of all (see Plate 40), this column
drum is not “hidden underneath soil or behind something else.” It’s in plain view in the lowest visible
course of the wall, and it does stick out like a sore thumb. It’s made of a distinctively different, much
darker, stone and it has a very different “look” from any neighboring block. It is quite unique in fact.
Secondly, as to the precision, I don’t agree with Lohmann that the column drum cannot be an Arab
repair. In Plates 42 and 43 the reader will find an example of another column drum which is certainly
part of an Arab repair to the walls of Baalbek and its precision is as good as that on the column drum
in the foundations. Another possibility I’ve considered—that it could be a Roman repair to a pre-Roman wall—also remains very much in play. If the lower block which this improvised block
replaced had been badly damaged, and a decision had been made to remove it, the two small
rectangular blocks above it (the ones Lohmann said “would fall, causing further instability for the
structures above”) would have had to be removed at the same time.
But the next course up is so set that none of the other blocks in it would have fallen, nor would any
instability have been caused to the huge megalith in the course above that, which is supported on no
less than five large horizontal blocks, three of which would be entirely unaffected by the removal of
the two smaller blocks below, while the other two would have been held in place by “frictional
connection.” Once the column drum had been cut to shape and put in place at ground level, the two
smaller blocks could have been slid back into the wall above it, completing a very neat and effective
repair.
There’s something else, a fundamental area of disagreement, concerning what I see as a U-shaped
megalithic wall surrounding Podium 1, but that Lohmann sees as the first courses of Podium 2. He
tells me that “aside from the size of the ashlars” what I call a U-shaped megalithic wall is “the bottom
of a standard shape of a Roman temple podium after Augustus times.” He asks me to take a look at the
podium of the Maison Carée in Nimes,
65 and suggests that the Temple of Bacchus in Baalbek itself
also has a similar podium.
66 He sends me links to photographs. “If you zoom in,” he writes, “you can
see the stones of the second layer above the bottom layer, corresponding to the Trilithon.”
My reply:
You write that the megalithic podium for the Temple of Jupiter, though obviously on a very
different scale, is the “standard shape of a Roman temple podium” but I’m not sure I see that
from the pix you linked to. I attach here one of ours from the Temple of Bacchus … (same angle
as the one you sent
67
). It shows a podium with a single straight side (apart from the lip at top
and bottom), whereas the podium of the Temple of Jupiter gives more of a stepped effect with
the row of huge megalithic blocks, that according to our correspondence form part of the lowest
layer of the Julio-Claudian Temple podium, stepped out very far from the sheer wall above
them, on top of which stood the peristalsis. I suppose the resemblance would be better if the
megalithic layer had been completed and extended all the way up to the top of the wall, but the peristalsis would still have been set back a few meters from the top, instead of pretty much flush
with the top as it is in the Temple of Bacchus. In short, when I zoom in to the Temple of Bacchus
podium I don’t really see blocks, regardless of scale, that correspond with the Trilithon blocks.
Am I missing something obvious here?
68
I also ask:
“Have you found organic materials with good provenance anywhere in ‘Podium 2’ and
have you done carbon dating on these?”
69
On the carbon dating Lohmann replies that “unfortunately” none had been done:
The history of constant change in the building, as well as deep excavation levels of the past 100
years have left no archaeological or organic material at all that would help us with this.
70
In its own way this is quite a revelation to me, since it means—to deploy an appropriate metaphor—
that the entire edifice of archaeological chronology for the so-called “Julio-Claudian podium”—
Podium 2—of the Temple of Jupiter, rests on foundations in which there is no scientific dating
evidence whatsoever. This is not to say that radiocarbon dates for archaeological sites are
unproblematic! As we’ve seen in earlier chapters, they are often very problematic indeed—unless it
can be demonstrated, as is the case at Göbekli Tepe, that the dated organic remains have been
“sealed” at a particular moment and there is no possibility of subsequent intrusion of later materials
that might give a falsely young date.
But there are simply no carbon dates, problematic or not, for Podium 2. It follows, therefore, that
the orthodox chronology of this incredibly interesting and peculiar structure is based entirely on
stylistic factors—that certain styles of building can be associated with specific cultures and specific
periods and that the “style” seen in Podium 2 is entirely appropriate to the “Julio-Claudian” epoch of
Roman construction.
It’s my view that the stylistic argument at Baalbek is nowhere near as clear-cut as it should be,
given how much of our understanding of the site depends on it. And in response to my question about
the positioning of the peristalsis (i.e. of the four-sided porch or hall of columns surrounding the cella
—the inner building—of the temple), Lohmann admits there is a stylistic anomaly:
yes, normally the peristalsis would rest on the edge of the podium, as it does at the Bacchus
temple. That would be following the Roman examples. (Mars-Ultor at the Roman Forum was a
milestone building for that
71
). It is one of the oddities of Jupiter.
72
On the other hand, Lohmann points out, temples do exist where the peristalsis is set back in the way he
envisages it would ultimately have been at Baalbek if Podium 2 had ever been completed—for
example, the Bel temple in Palmyra, the temple of Zeus in Aizanoi, Turkey, and the colossal temple in
Tarsos, Turkey. “In my opinion,” he writes:
this is due to the fact that both Bel temple, and Jupiter in Baalbek, were built onto older podia
(Herodian in Baalbek, Hellenistic in Palmyra), and had to find a solution how to squeeze a
first-century, latest-fashion Roman podium underneath the (even only slightly) older temple
building. Baalbek’s terrace was immensely high, so the podium needed to be colossal, and in
Palmyra the peristalsis was already standing, so the podium was erected at a distance.
73
Further, Lohmann stands his ground on the issue of the shape of Podium 2 which, despite its
incompleteness, he sees as being quite normal:
a standard podium consists of a bottom profile (lip, as you call it), the “shaft” or the vertical
part (that’s the trilithon layer in Baalbek…) and a top lip layer …74
He attaches an architectural diagram of the podium of Hosn Niha, another Roman temple in Lebanon,
to make his point.
75 To my eye, however, it looks astonishingly unlike Podium 2 at Baalbek and the
layer in it that he wants me to compare to the Trilithon is just 1.58 meters (5 feet 3 inches) high,
whereas the Trilithon, as we’ve seen, is 4.34 meters (14 feet 3 inches) high.
As I’ve already noted, I think Daniel Lohmann makes a strong case, but nothing in our
correspondence proves to me that the U-shaped megalithic wall (that surrounds, but that does not
support, Podium 1 on which the Temple of Jupiter in fact stands) is the work of the Romans. He could
be right. But he could also be wrong and, in context of all the other indications from around the world
of a lost civilization, I think it wise to keep an open mind on Baalbek.
Finally, however, it’s what I see in the quarry that convinces me of this, because we have to ask
ourselves why three huge blocks in the range of 1,000 to 1,650 tons were left there at all.
The conventional answer is that the Romans, having quarried these exceptionally large blocks,
found that they could not move them and simply abandoned them. But that explanation makes very
little sense. If the argument that the Romans were responsible for the U-shaped megalithic wall is
correct, then we know that they went on to build an extensive temple complex dedicated to Jupiter
using smaller blocks of stone. Surely their first source for the multiple smaller blocks they needed
would have been the huge megaliths that, according to the argument of mainstream archaeology, they
had discovered they could not move from the quarry? The Romans were practical people, who would
not allow work that they had already so painstakingly done to go to waste. Rather than opening up
fresh quarry faces, wouldn’t they have used those massive, already almost completely quarried
1,000-ton-plus blocks and simply sliced them up into smaller, more moveable megaliths for the
construction of the rest of the temple?
It’s really puzzling that they didn’t do so and therefore the fact that these gigantic, almost finished
blocks remain in the quarry, and were never sliced up into smaller blocks and used in the general
construction of the Temple of Jupiter, suggests to me very strongly that the Romans did not even know
they were there—just as the German Archaeological Institute, despite a hundred years of excavations,
didn’t know until 2014 that a third massive block was there. In due course, I’m told, “good new
information about the dating and practicalities of the quarry megaliths” may be forthcoming, but that
information was not available at the time of writing.
76
I await it with interest, but also with some
doubt as to whether it will settle anything or simply raise further questions.
We are a species with amnesia. The devastating comet impacts that set the Younger Dryas in train
12,800 years ago and that caused two episodes of global flooding, one at the beginning and one at the
end of the Younger Dryas, made us forget so much. The recovery of memory from the fragments that
remain is logistically difficult and psychologically painful—as the complexities and decades of
disputes around Baalbek show. But messages still reach us from the deep and distant past in the
words of the Sages, in the deeds of the magicians, and in the mighty memorials that they left behind to
awaken us at the time of the Great Return.
next
The Gates of the Sun
source and notes
