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.”