Thursday, December 30, 2021

Part 7 : Magicians of the Gods...And Then Came the Deluge

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.

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.

Or, alternatively: 

the solid foundation forming the floor and substructure of a classical temple; crepidoma; podium.

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
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