The Holy Land and Syria

by Frank G. Carpenter

All this, however, gives no idea of the construction. People wonder how the mighty stones of the Pyramids were put into place, and books have been written to show how the obelisks were taken from the quarries to the sites where they were erected as monuments. The building of the temples of Baalbek was a far greater mechanical triumph. The materials, including columns weighing hundreds of tons, had to be brought up the steep Lebanon Mountains and carried over passes higher than the tops of the Alleghanies. There is granite here which came from far up the Nile; there are marbles from Greece, and great limestone blocks from the quarries near by. The temple has walls sixty feet high, and the mighty columns—seven feet in diameter, and, including the pedestals and capitals, as tall as an eight-story building—rest upon a platform which is more than fifty feet high. These mighty pillars are put up in three sections each twenty feet or more in height and seven feet in diameter. They are so put together that each column looks like one solid block.

In the walls of the temple foundation are what are, I venture, the biggest building blocks ever quarried. One of the walls has three great limestone blocks each of which measures sixty-four feet long, thirteen feet wide, and twelve feet thick. If such stones were placed end to end it would take only about eighty of them to make one mile. These stones were brought from a quarry about a mile away. Some of them have been placed upon the walls at a distance of thirty or more feet from the ground, and are so accurately laid that a knife blade cannot be driven between them.

I got an idea of the size of these blocks by visiting the quarries. Just outside that from which the stones came is one which was cut out of the rock, but for some reason or other was not carried to the structure. It was dragged only a few feet away from the virgin rock, and to-day lies there on its side, half buried in the earth. Upon its top I walked over it. It is so wide that you could drive two motor cars abreast upon it without risk of falling over the edges, and an English traveller here says that a cricket match might be played upon its face, putting the stakes at the right distance apart and giving the bowler at least two feet at the end for his run. This block is as smooth as a marble column and accurately square. Each side of it measures fourteen feet and it is about seventy feet long. If it were stood on end inside a modern ten-story apartment house it would fill ten rooms one above the other, each room fourteen feet square and seven feet high. It has been estimated to weigh fifteen hundred tons and if cut up would make a good load for thirty flat cars.

Think of moving stones like that out of the mountains and up and down hill for a mile without the aid of steam, electricity, or any kind of machinery! That is the kind of work the Romans did eighteen hundred years ago. All through the temples you may see examples of such huge masses moved about and lifted into place.

There are carvings more beautiful than anything seen on our buildings to-day. On some of the blocks still in the structure I saw bunches of grapes no bigger than my thumb as beautifully cut as though made by nature. There were also Cupids and cherubs exquisitely carved. It was said of the artists who built the great temples of Delhi and Agra in India that they worked like Titans and finished like jewellers. The same was true of the Romans of the reigns of Antonius, Caracalla, and Nero.

I have taken photographs of some of the broken columns with myself standing beside them to give an idea of their size. I am five feet eight inches tall and the large columns are fully two feet more in diameter. Some of the wonderful carvings are those which form the frieze above the great pillars two or three hundred feet high up in the air. Among them are the heads of gigantic lions, each head as big as a flour barrel but polished like a fine marble mantel. Through the mouths of these lions emptied the drains of the roof.

The beauties of the temples will be preserved from now on. They are under official guard, and tickets which cost a dollar apiece are required of all who go in. I was shown through by Dr. Michel Alouf, an archæologist, who explained just how the temples looked in the past. He showed me where the early Christians had erected a church inside one temple, defacing the carvings and breaking the noses of the beautiful statues. They took pleasure in destroying the work wrought by heathen artists in honour of pagan gods. Next came the Arabs, who used the place as a fort, throwing great round chunks of marble as big as footballs from its sheltering walls. There are piles of these marble balls inside the temple to-day. They were probably cut from the columns. The Arabs made a mosque in the temple. They wiped out every trace of the Christian religion and used a part of the church for a bath. After them came an earthquake, so that the ruins were mostly covered up until the Germans began their excavations.

I am stopping here in the little town of Baalbek, which stands right on the edge of the ruins. It has an excellent hotel, and its people are hospitable. Its population of five or six thousand is made up of Mohammedans and Christians. Besides a small garrison of soldiers, there are two Greek Catholic monasteries and several girls’ schools. The children followed us as we walked about through the ruins, selling purses made of Syrian silk into which they had woven a design of the six great columns of the temple. They also asked for baksheesh, and the begging palm was everywhere thrust out.

I am surprised at the scanty forestation of these mountains of Lebanon. I had expected to find them covered with woods, whereas they are almost treeless. Their lower slopes are well cultivated and some of them are terraced almost to the top. Thousands of acres, made up of little patches, rise step-like one above another, covering the hills for miles and miles. These patches contain mulberry orchards and vineyards. There are also peaches and apples, and in the valleys are rich fields of wheat, barley, and clover. The chief formation is limestone, and though there are rocks everywhere, the soil seems wonderfully rich.

The cedars of Lebanon may have been great in the past, but they have now almost disappeared. The only ones left are situated about nine or ten hours from Baalbek. The trees grow in the thin soil, which covers the white limestone, the ground being coated with spines, cones, and leaves. Five are very ancient and of great girth, but the tallest is not more than eighty feet high. The largest of all is about fifteen feet thick, so you see they are mere sprouts in comparison with the Big Trees of California and quite small as compared with the giants of Washington and Oregon. The cedars which were taken for the temple at Jerusalem probably came from the region where the old cedars stand, although other parts of the Lebanon Mountains may then have been covered with woods. The logs must have been cut in the forests and carried over the mountains forty or fifty miles to the seacoast. The rafting was done under the direction of King Hiram of Tyre, and the logs were probably towed down to Jaffa, and thence carried up the mountains of Judea to Jerusalem, a distance of about forty miles. The cedars bear cones about as large as a goose egg. The leaves or spines of the cones are solid rather than detached, as those of our cedars at home. The wood is whitish in colour; it is soft, and for building is far inferior to cypress or pine.