“ ‘Who built Baal-bec? is a question that has been vainly asked for over 3,000 years, and then as now, men repeated “Who?” and echo said “Baal-bec!” and says “Baal-bec” still.
“ ‘In a barren, sterile, sandy plain, which the augurs of the artesian borers proved to have been once a rich and fertile bottom-land or prairie, a very short distance westward of the Theban ruins, there once existed a vast and magnificent city, so splendid that the modern capitals of Europe are mere hutted towns in comparison. This is proved by what has been exhumed from Earth’s bosom. In that city of palaces is the wreck of one, which, from its situation with respect to other ruins, must have been merely a third or fourth-rate edifice in the golden days when Aznak flourished; yet the portico of this fourth-rate structure, situated in a suburb of the city, the name of which suburb was Karnak, consisted of 144 Porphyritic columns, 26 feet 6 inches apart. Each one was 39 feet 5 inches in circumference, and not less than 52 feet high, and every one was hewn out of a single stone!
“ ‘Moreover, this fourth-rate palace was two miles, five furlongs, and eight feet long, by actual measurement of the ruins, and it required a journey of quite nine miles to go around it.
“ ‘This palace faced the Sacred River (Nile), from which led a broad avenue lined with colossal statues on each side, as close as they could stand, for a distance of over one English league, and every one of these statues commemorated either a king or a dynasty of that more than regal country.
“ ‘Now, mark what I say: Proof, positive proof exists that this palace, itself so imperial, so grand, so immeasurably superior to aught of the kind attempted by man in this “Progressive age (?)” was, after all, but a mere addition, an inconsiderable wing, a sort of appendage, a kind of out-house to one of the main edifices of that immortal city.
“ ‘No man knows, or for four thousand years has known, who built Aznak—who laid the stones of Karnak—who cut marble monsters weighing two hundred and thirteen tons out of a single block of stone, and that stone so hard that no modern steel will cut, or even scratch it!
“ ‘Railways! steam power! wheels! pulleys! screws! wedges! inclined planes! levers, did you say?
“ ‘Sir, all these things existed long ago, else how could solid obelisks of five hundred tons weight have been transported a distance exceeding one thousand one hundred miles, from the mountains where they were hewn, to the places where they were set up, and where we find them to-day?
“ ‘Without all the appliances enumerated, how could these monuments, some of which measure eighty-nine feet in length, have been erected after they were brought; and take notice, that some of these stone monsters were placed upon pedestals, themselves ten or twelve feet high?
“ ‘It would strain the treasury of a modern state to pay the expense attendant upon the erection of half-a-dozen such—as was proved here in Paris in the case of the Obelisk of Luxor, the smallest of two that stood before the Temple of Thebes, and which cost France over two million dollars to place where it now stands. Without steam power and railways, how could such immense masses of stone have been transported over and through vast plains of shifting, burning sands, especially for such immense distances as it is certain they were brought? A single further remark on chronology, and I have done. It has been established among the learned, that it takes not less than a period of ten thousand years for a language to be perfected, and then die out, to give place to an improved but entirely different one. Now, observe: Champollion declares that he, through the assistance of modern Egyptian, was able to master ancient Egyptian. This furnished a key to certain hieroglyphs; these latter proved instrumental toward simplifying a series of three more. He concludes that he has sufficient evidence to establish the fact, that several successive languages had been spoken in the two Egypts (Upper and Lower).