THE GIANT STONES OF BAALBEK
The most impressive of all the ancient temples of Syria can now be
reached by a comfortable railway journey from either Damascus or Beirut.
But this way the traveler comes upon the ruins too quickly to appreciate
adequately their splendid situation and marvelous size. I shall always be
thankful that, on my first visit to Baalbek, I approached it very slowly
as I rode from our camp among the cedars of Lebanon. For the longer you
look at these temples and the greater the distance from which you behold
them, the more fully do you realize that whatever race first built a
shrine here chose the spot which, of all their land, had the largest,
noblest setting for a sanctuary; and the better also do you understand
that these structures had to be made unique in their grandeur because
anything less imposing would have seemed paltry in comparison with the
surrounding glories of nature.
Where the Bikaʿ is highest and widest and most fertile, on a foothill of
Anti-Lebanon which projects far enough to give a commanding outlook in
all directions, stands Baalbek, the City of the Sun-God. Far northward
Hollow Syria leads to the open wheat-lands of Homs and Hama; at the south
it sinks gently to the foot of Hermon. Back of the city are the peaks
of the Eastern Mountains, and across the level valley rise the highest
summits of Lebanon. It is no wonder that the approaching traveler finds
it difficult at first to realize the magnitude of the ruins. Any work
of man would be dwarfed by the magnificent heights which look down upon
Baalbek. But what an inspiration these same mountains must have been to
the unknown architect who conceived the daring grandeur of the Temple of
the Sun!
When I viewed the ruins from the summit of the highest mountain of
Lebanon, their columns did not seem especially large. Then I remembered
that there are few structures whose details can be distinguished at all
from a point twenty miles away. After descending many thousand feet
through rocky ravines and dry water-courses, we came out on the Bikaʿ and
again saw the temples. They now appeared of moderate size and very near.
It was hard to believe that a few minutes’ canter would not bring us to
them and, as we rode across the monotonous level of the valley, it seemed
as if each new mile would surely be the last. When I had traveled for an
hour straight toward their slender columns and found them apparently as
far away as ever, I began to understand that these temples must be of a
bigness beyond anything that I had ever seen before.
While we were looking toward Mount Hermon, whose conical summit rose from
behind the southern horizon, the hot, shimmering air began to arrange
itself in horizontal layers of varying density, and before our wondering
eyes there grew a picture of cool and shady comfort. Four or five miles
away a grove of date-palms stood beside a beautiful blue lake in which
were a number of little islands, each with its cluster of bushes or its
group of trees; and, just beyond the islands, the rippling water laved
the steep sides of Mount Hermon. It was a cheering sight for the tired
traveler. This was no freak of an imagination crazed by privation and
exhaustion. Everything was as clear-cut and distinct as were the temples
of Baalbek. We knew very well that there was no lake in the Bikaʿ and
that Mount Hermon was not within fifty miles of where it seemed to be;
yet we agreed upon every detail of the wonderful mirage. We counted the
wooded islets; we pointed out to each other the beauty of the shrubbery
and the symmetry of the waving palm trees; we remarked upon the sharp
reflections of the branches in the clear water. Then, while we looked,
the islands began to swim around, the bushes shrank together, the trees
shifted their positions, the blue water faded into a misty white, old
Hermon receded far into the background—and soon all that was left were
two or three dusty palms bowing listlessly over the dry, brown earth in
the sizzling heat.
I had always thought of Baalbek as a magnificent ruin in the midst of a
wilderness; at best, I expected to find huddled beneath the temples a
tiny hamlet like that at Palmyra. But as we came nearer to the spot of
green about the columns, it grew larger and larger, and finally opened
out into a prosperous-looking town of five thousand inhabitants besides,
as we discovered later, a garrison of Turkish soldiers and a host of
summer visitors. The bazaars were busy and noisy, and the half-dozen
hotels were filled with the cream of Syrian society. Gay young prodigals
from Beirut clattered recklessly along on blooded mares, or lolled back
in rickety barouches, talking French to pretty girls whose silk dresses
were so nearly correct that our masculine eyes could not detect just what
was the matter with them.
The German archæologists who were then excavating among the ruins told us
that the hotel where we had planned to lodge was incorrectly constructed
and would surely fall down some day, and advised us to take rooms at
the more substantial building where they were dwelling. Here we found
one of those typically cosmopolitan companies which add so much variety
to life in Syria. Besides the Germans, there was a suave little Turkish
gentleman, a very amiable Armenian lady, a radiantly beautiful Hungarian,
an English “baroness” who did not explain where she had obtained
this obsolete title, and a couple of those innocently daring American
maiden-ladies who blunder unprotected through foreign countries whose
languages they do not understand, and yet somehow never seem to get into
serious trouble.
Everybody but the American ladies spoke French, so we had several
delightful evenings together. With the Armenian we discussed the recent
massacres when the Turkish gentleman was not by. The Hungarian lady
discoursed heatedly upon the thesis that the Magyars are not subjects
but allies of the Austrian Empire. The baroness told us thrilling tales
of social and political intrigues on three continents, some of which we
believed. The Germans interpreted enormous drawings of their excavations,
and my traveling companion and I sang negro songs to the accompaniment of
a tiny, wheezy melodion.
Baalbek is deservedly popular as a summer resort; for its elevation
is nearly four thousand feet and, even in August, there are few
uncomfortably warm days. In fact, the city has long borne the reputation
of being the coolest in Syria. The Arab geographer Mukadassi, who lived
in the tenth century, wrote that “among the sayings of the people it is
related how, when men asked of the cold, ‘Where shall we find thee?’ it
was answered, ‘In the Belka,’[52] and when they further said, ‘But if we
meet thee not there?’ then the cold answered, ‘Verily, in Baalbek is my
home.’”
The most attractive features of the city, next to its refreshing climate,
are its unusual number of shaded streets and its copious supply of pure,
cold water. Both of these are somewhat rare in Syria. In this land of
generous orchards, there are very few shade-trees; and during the long,
rainless summer the flow of the springs is usually husbanded with great
care. In Baalbek, however, the water is allowed to run everywhere in
almost reckless abundance. It gushes out of a score of fountains; it
drives the mills, waters the gardens and rushes alongside the streets in
swift, clear streams. Our own supply for drinking was drawn from one of
the springs; but we were told that even the water in the deep roadside
gutters was clean and healthful.
On account of the natural advantages of its situation, it is probable
that Baalbek has been in existence ever since the time when men first
began to build cities. The sub-structures of the acropolis are literally
prehistoric, that is, they antedate anything that we know at all
certainly about the history of the place. In the Book of Joshua[53]
we find three references to “Baal-gad in the valley (Hebrew, _Bikaʿ_)
of Lebanon,” but the identification of this place with Baalbek is far
from certain. The Arab geographers of the twelfth century, who were
tremendously impressed by the grandeur of the ruins and the fertility of
the surrounding district, believed that the larger temple was built by
Solomon, who also had a magnificent palace here, and that the city was
given by him as a dowry to Balkis, Queen of Sheba. Benjamin of Tudela, a
Spanish rabbi who visited Syria in the year 1163, wrote that when Solomon
was laying the heaviest stones, he invoked the assistance of the genii.
It may possibly be that the foundations are even older than the time of
Solomon; but there is no historical notice of the city which goes back
of the Roman period. Coins of the first century A. D. indicate that it
was then a colony of the Empire and was known as Heliopolis, the Greek
translation of the Semitic name Baalbek.
During the early centuries of our era Heliopolis became exceedingly
prosperous and, indeed, famous. The emperor Antoninus Pius is said to
have erected here a temple to Jupiter which was one of the wonders of
the world, and coins struck in Syria about 200 A. D., in the reign of
Septimius Severus, bear the representations of two temples. During this
period the worship of Baal became popular far beyond the borders of
Syria, and the Semitic sun-god was identified with the Roman Jupiter. The
empress of Severus was daughter of a priest of Baal at Homs, only sixty
miles north of Baalbek. When her nephew Varius[54] usurped the throne,
he assumed the new imperial title of “High Priest of the Sun-God” and
erected a temple to that deity on the Palatine Hill. At Baalbek itself
the worship was accompanied by licentious orgies until the conversion of
Constantine the Great, who abolished these iniquitous practices, erected
a church in the Great Court of the Temple of the Sun, and consecrated a
bishop to rule over the still heathen inhabitants of the new see.
Since then, the history of Baalbek has been parallel to that of every
other stronghold in Syria, a history of battles and sieges and massacres
and a long succession of conquerors with little in common except their
cruelty. When the Arabs captured the city in the seventh century, they
converted the whole temple area into a fortress whose strategic position,
overlooking the Bikaʿ and close to the great caravan routes, enabled
it to play an important part in the wars of the Middle Ages. Many a
great army has battered at this citadel. Iconoclastic Moslems have done
all they could to deface its carvings and statues, earthquake after
earthquake has shaken the temples, scores of buildings in the present
town have been constructed from materials taken from the acropolis,
columns and cornices have been robbed of the iron clasps that held their
stones together, and for many years the Great Court was choked with the
slowly accumulating débris of a squalid village which lay within its
protecting walls.
Yet neither iconoclast nor sapper, artilleryman nor peasant, has been
able to destroy the majesty of the temples of Baalbek. The malice of the
image-breaker cannot tumble down thousand-ton building-blocks and grows
weary in the effort to deface cornices eighty feet above him. Mosques
and khans, barracks and castle walls have been built out of this immense
quarry of ready-cut stone, yet the supply seems hardly diminished. The
cannonballs of the Middle Ages fell back harmless before twenty feet
of solid masonry, and only God’s earthquake has been able to shake the
massive foundations of the Temple of Baal.
The old walls of the acropolis provide many a tempting place for an
adventurous clamber. Beside the main gateway at the eastern end you can
ascend a winding stairway, half-choked with rubbish; then comes some hard
climbing over broken portions of the upper fortifications and a bit of
careful stepping around a narrow ledge on the outside of a turret. But
it is well worth a little exertion and risk to reach the top of this
majestic portal, where you can lie lazily among great piles of broken
carvings and watch the long shadows of the setting sun creep over what
have been called “the most beautiful mass of ruins that man has ever seen
and the like of which he will never behold again.”
Our superlative expressions are prostituted to such base uses that it is
hard to find words to picture adequately these colossal structures. To
say that they are most majestic, gigantic, stupendous, is only to trifle
with terms. The mere partition-wall beneath us is nineteen feet thick, a
single stone in one of the gate-towers is twenty-five feet long, and the
entrance stairway, now half-buried beneath an orchard, is a hundred and
fifty feet wide. Everything about us is immense; yet the parts are so
nicely proportioned that at first their size does not seem very unusual.
The German archæologists warned me against jumping carelessly from one
stone to another. “The distance between them will be greater than you
think.” You have to revise your ordinary judgments of perspective before
you can realize that yonder little alcove in the Great Court is as big
as an ordinary church, or can make yourself believe that the outlines of
the Temple of the Sun enclose an area as large as that of Westminster
Abbey, or can break the habit of thinking condescendingly of the “Smaller
Temple”—which is one of the finest Græco-Roman edifices in existence.
Suddenly you see the acropolis in its real immensity and beauty, and then
you understand how the most scholarly of all Syrian travelers could say
that the temples of Baalbek “are like those of Athens in lightness, but
far surpass them in vastness; they are vast and massive like those of
Thebes, but far excel them in airiness and grace.”[55]
[Illustration: The Acropolis of Baalbek—1, The Propylæa; 2, The
Forecourt; 3, The Court of the Altar; 4, The Basilica of Constantine;
5, The Great Altar of the Temple; 6, Byzantine Baths; 7, The Temple of
Jupiter-Baal; 8, The Six Standing Columns; 9, The Great Stones in the
Foundation Wall; 10, The Temple of Bacchus.]
From the entrance stairway at the east to the Great Temple at the west,
the arrangement is grandly cumulative. Each succeeding architectural
feature is larger and more beautiful than that which precedes it. As you
view the acropolis from above the portico, your eye is drawn on and on,
past the symmetrical forecourt and the great Court of the Altar, under
delicately chiseled arches and graceful cornices, through the Triple
Gate and the temple portal, up to the culmination of it all—the six tall
columns which still rise above the ruins of the Temple of the Sun. No!
this is not yet the climax of the glories of Baalbek; for beyond those
slender shafts the hoary head of Lebanon, towering far into the sky, at
once dwarfs and dignifies, enslaves and ennobles, the puny massiveness of
the sanctuary of Baal.
The Great Court, or “Court of the Altar,” is littered with sculptured
stones—pedestals of statues, inscriptions in Greek and Latin, broken
columns, curbs of old wells and fragments of fallen cornices. On each
side of the few remains of the Basilica of Constantine are Roman baths,
which are carved in a graceful, profuse manner, very like those at Nîmes
in southern France.
The sculptors seem to have worked in three shifts. The first were mere
stone-cutters who removed surplus material, shaping a hemisphere where
a head was to appear in bas-relief, and indicating the rough outlines
of leaves and flowers. The second set of workmen carved the design more
carefully, leaving it for the third, the master-artists, to give the
final touches. In the temple baths we can see traces of the work of all
three classes. One part of the carving is finished to the last crinkle
of a rose leaf; another is but roughly blocked out by a mere artisan. It
seems that the full plan for the courts was never carried to completion.
Some think, indeed, that the only portion of the Great Temple itself
which was finished was the peristyle.
A little to the southwest of the Court of the Altar stands the Temple
of Bacchus. This suffers the fate of great men whose fame is eclipsed
by that of their greater brothers. Yet this “Smaller Temple,” as it
is commonly called, is larger than the Parthenon, and is surpassed in
the beauty of its architecture by no other similar edifice outside of
Athens. It was originally surrounded by forty-two columns, each fifty-two
and a half feet in height. A number of these have been overthrown by
earthquakes and cannonballs, but on the north side the peristyle is still
nearly perfect. One of the columns on the south side has fallen against
the temple, yet, although made up of three drums, the parts are held so
firmly together by iron clamps that it has broken several stones of the
wall without itself coming to pieces.
Intricate stone-cut tracery runs riot over the double frieze, the fluted
half-columns and niches, and the variously shaped panels which form the
roof of the peristyle. There are flowers and fruits and leaves, vines
and grapes and garlands, men and women, gods and goddesses, satyrs and
nymphs, and the youthful god himself, surrounded by laughing bacchantes.
Most elaborate of all is the carving around the lofty central portal,
which is probably more exquisite in detail than anything else of its kind
in existence. The door-posts are forty feet high, yet they are chiseled
with such a delicacy that they seem almost as light as a filigree of
Damascus silver-work. Upon the under side of the lintel a great eagle
holds a staff in its claws, while from its beak droop long garlands of
flowers, the ends of which are held by genii.
Of the Temple of Jupiter-Baal, which was the principal structure of
the acropolis, only six columns are now standing; but these six can be
seen far up and down the Bikaʿ. As you stand beside them and look up,
the columns appear of tremendous bulk, as indeed they are; yet their
proportions are so elegant that at a little distance they seem almost
frail. When you view them from many miles away, they appear as tenuous
as the strings of a colossal harp, awaiting the touch of Æolus himself
to set them vibrating in tremendous harmony. Now the columns, crossed by
the cornice above, resemble a titanic gate ready to swing open to the
Garden of the Gods; now they are seen in profile, like a giant finger
pointing upward. When the evening glow falls upon them, the stone takes
on a yellowish tinge and the slender shafts look like a golden grating
which some old master has put between the panels of his daring picture
of brazen clouds and dazzling mountaintops. Even the long colonnades of
Palmyra lack something of the peculiar grandeur of the six columns of
Baalbek, as they stand guard over the ruined Temple of Baal, with nothing
to rival their towering grandeur save the eternal peaks of Lebanon.
Yet, though these columns are the most beautiful things in Baalbek, they
are not its greatest marvel; for in the foundations of the acropolis are
stones so immense that we can only guess at the means employed to quarry
and transport and lift into place these huge masses of rock.
Parallel to the north side of the Temple of the Sun is an outer wall
ten feet thick and composed of nine stones, each thirty feet long and
thirteen feet high; in the west foundation-wall of the acropolis are
seven other stones of equal size, not lying upon the ground but set on
lower tiers; and just above these is a series of three stones which are
probably the largest ever handled by man.
[Illustration: The stone in the quarry of Baalbek]
[Illustration: The Orontes River at Hama]
These tremendous three were so renowned in ancient times that the temple
above them came to be known as the _Trilithon_. They are each thirteen
feet high, probably ten feet thick, and their lengths are respectively
sixty-three, sixty-three and a half, and sixty-four feet. It is hard to
realize their true dimensions, however; for these enormous blocks are set
into the wall twenty-three feet above the ground, and are fitted together
so closely that you can hardly insert the edge of a penknife between
them. Look at them as long as you will, you can never fully see their
bigness. Yet if only one were taken out of the wall, a space would be
left large enough to contain a Pullman sleeping-car. Each stone, though
it seems only of fitting size for this noble acropolis, weighs as much
as many a coastwise steamer. If it were cut up into building blocks a
foot thick, it would provide enough material to face a row of apartment
houses two hundred feet long and six stories high. If it were sawn into
flag-stones an inch thick, it would make a pavement three feet wide and
over six miles in length.
The quarry from which was taken the material for the temples is about
three-quarters of a mile from the acropolis. Here lies a still larger
stone which, on account of some imperfection, was never completely
separated from the mother rock. By this time we have no breath left for
exclamations; hyperbole would be impossible; the simple measurements are
astounding enough. The _Hajr el-Hibla_,[56] as it is called, is thirteen
feet wide, fourteen feet high, seventy-one feet long, and would weigh
at least a thousand tons. It does not arouse our wonderment, however, as
much as do those other stones, only a little smaller, which were actually
finished and built into the wall.
How, indeed, were such huge blocks moved from the quarry to the
acropolis? How were they lifted into place and fitted so nicely together?
The question has not been answered to our entire satisfaction. We must
acknowledge that those old Syrians—if they _were_ Syrians—could perform
feats of engineering that would challenge the science of the present
day. The most plausible guess is that a long incline was built all the
way from the quarry to the temple wall and then, through a prodigal
expenditure of time and labor, the blocks were moved slowly up the
regular slope, a fraction of an inch at a time, by balancing them back
and forth on wooden rollers. But it is almost as easy to believe with the
natives that there were giants in those days, and that the great stone
which is still in the quarry was being carried along under her arm by a
young woman, when she heard her baby cry, and so dropped her burden and
left it there to be the wonderment of us puny folk.