Syria, the land of Lebanon

by Lewis Gaston Leary

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]

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.