I knew Zecharia Sitchin personally, had a few dinners with him in New York and once drove him from Stonehenge to London when he was on a visit to England. I liked him well enough, and I think he did some good research, but on Baalbek at least I have no doubt now—after exploring the site myself—that his whole “landing platform” thesis is fundamentally flawed. This is not to say, however, that every idea set out in his books was equally compromised. The Mesopotamian cuneiform texts, which he could not read and translate as he claimed (his “translations” were adapted and to some extent “fictionalized” from the work of mainstream scholars) do in fact contain material of the greatest interest, and I think he was right to notice hints of high technology in them.
But were those technologies “alien” or human? This is a question we’ll return to in Chapter Sixteen, when we’ll consider what is known about certain powerful beings referred to in Biblical and other ancient texts as “the Nephilim” and “the Watchers.”
The biggest cut stone block in the world
“I have found that archaeologists are seldom receptive to the notion of ancient astronauts,” wrote Elif Batuman in an article about Baalbek in the New Yorker on December 18, 2014, “although one could argue that, when the archaeologists went looking for answers, all they managed to find was an even bigger and more mysterious block.”58
Indeed so! In June 2014, just a month before I arrived in Baalbek, the German Archaeological Institute made a stunning discovery in the quarries half a mile south of the Temple of Jupiter. There, it had long been known, lay two giant megaliths that are heavier, by a significant margin, than any of the stones in the Trilithon. What no one had suspected, however, despite a century of rather intensive investigations around Baalbek, was that a third immense block lay buried and hidden from view under the sediment that has accumulated in the quarry over the millennia. The archaeologists chose not to announce their discovery to the world until late November 2014, but since they had excavated it in June, it lay there in full view when I first visited the quarry on July 10 and a local shopkeeper—who claimed that the discovery was in fact his and that the Germans had merely appropriated it—made a point of drawing it to my attention.
The quarry is in two parts, divided by a road, and in the first area you come to as you approach from the direction of the temples lies the famous “Stone of the Pregnant Woman,” also known as the “Stone of the South,” which has been decorating postcards from Baalbek for a hundred years and was known to travelers like David Urquhart long before that. It measures 21.5 meters (almost 71 feet) in length, 4.2 meters (just under 14 feet) in height, and 4.3 meters (just over 14 feet) in width. It weighs 970 tons.59 Across the road a second even bigger megalith, which had lain undiscovered since time immemorial, was unearthed in the 1990s. It measures 20.5 meters (just over 67 feet) in length, 4.56 meters wide (almost 15 feet) and 4.5 (14 feet 9 inches) meters high; its weight has been calculated to be 1,242 tons.60 But the megalith that was discovered in June 2014 has a mass greater than either of these, measuring 19.6 meters (64 feet 4 inches) long, 6 meters (19 feet 9 inches) wide, and 5.5 meters (18 feet) high, with an estimated weight of 1,650 tons.61
It was this newly excavated megalith, the single largest block of stone ever quarried in the ancient world, that the excited shopkeeper proudly pointed out to me during my visit. Its upper surface is less than two meters (6 feet 7 inches) below the lower edge of the Stone of the Pregnant Woman, which it lies immediately beside and parallel to. And, like the Stone of the Pregnant Woman, it is beautifully cut and shaped, ready, after removal of the “boss,” to go straight into the U-shaped wall for which all three giant blocks were undoubtedly intended.
I spend some hours clambering around these weird, otherworldly blocks. I feel as though I’m mountaineering. The scale is so immense, and in a way so “alien,” that a curious detachment from everyday reality sets in and I lose all track of time. I note that the Stone of the Pregnant Woman appears to have been sliced through at the base, where it emerges from the bedrock, with a clean straight cut. How was that done? And no matter where I stand—above, below, beside—I am dwarfed by this monstrous product of ancient and unknowable minds. The very thought that someone, in some distant epoch, could conceive of this, could cut it out and shape it entire and then, at the end, just leave it here, abandon it, forget about it, is incomprehensible to me. The closer I examine it, the more details I observe of the precision of the workmanship, of the scale of the enterprise, and of the will and imagination that went into its creation, the more certain I become that it and its fellows here in the quarries, and the Trilithon, and the other giant megaliths of Baalbek, were not the work of the Romans.
I know how profoundly Daniel Lohmann disagrees! A few months later, in February 2015, he and I will correspond at some length over several days. He will graciously answer many questions and help me to understand some of the complexities of Baalbek that escaped me when I was there. He’ll make an excellent case for the Roman provenance of the whole vast scheme. He will even send me a photograph of the column drum built into the foundations of the Trilithon wall and he’ll write:
In my recent work I located this column drum fragment, excavated it anew, and measured it millimeter precise to determine the drum diameter. I looked at the surface structure and masons dressing in comparison with the Jupiter temple columns and the lithology. All indications are exactly the same as the column drums of the Roman Jupiter temple. The fragment was neatly dressed at the edges to make a masonry ashlar out of it, and it received the beautifully sharply cut edges that all ashlars of the Roman Jupiter Temple phase have (including the megaliths).62
My reply:
First of all, to be absolutely clear, I don’t dispute that this fragment is from a column drum of the Roman Jupiter Temple. Clearly it is. And I don’t dispute the generally agreed dating of the columns of the Roman Jupiter Temple. But this fragment is a very important part of the (formidable!) edifice of logic you and your colleagues use to establish the chronology of the Trilithon, and that many others have relied upon when reporting that chronology. What I’d like to interrogate a little further, therefore, is your level of certainty that this column drum fragment was put there at the same time as the original construction of the western wall. It’s nicely cut and shaped, I agree, but still it sticks out like a sore thumb (especially now I see it cleared in the photo you kindly sent me). It looks intrusive, odd and awkward—very different from the rest of the blocks in this course. In short I think the argument can be made that it is more likely to be a later repair of the wall than it is to be an integral part of the original wall. Lending some support to this argument is that we know the Arabs were constantly repairing the walls around the whole site, and sometimes using column drums to do so, so why shouldn’t this be just one more of those repairs? What is the absolutely compelling archaeological evidence that completely, effectively and once and for all rules this possibility out? I’d be most grateful if you could address that specific point in your reply.63
Lohmann comes right back at me on this:
The fragment is just one of the indications that shows the synchronicity of the megalith podium and the temple, which was not our result, but known to science for over one hundred years—and at latest since the excavations by the German team of 1900–1904. Yes, it sticks out. But no—not unlike the others. The builders of the temple were rather pragmatic: once the structure was to be hidden underneath the soil or behind something else, they didn’t bother to flatten the surfaces or make it look nice … What was important first when building is that the ashlar was perfectly flattened on the top and bottom, and then the two sides, in order to create a solid and stable wall—and that was done on the column drum exactly in the same Roman manner as it was done on the blocks around it. If you look at the length of the fragment, and imagine a hole in the wall instead, the two smaller ashlars in the course above would fall, causing further instability for the structures above. Here, frictional connecti
on/force closure (translations of kraftschluss from my dictionary—language barriers!) is needed, you can’t just replace an ashlar in a row of “stretchers.” Secondly, Arab repairs of Roman walls look a lot different: they used smaller blocks instead, and would never have been able to squeeze a block in so tightly … Medieval repairs never have such tight joints. It’s a comparison of precision that makes an engineer like me 100% certain.64
After examining our own photographs of the Trilithon wall—Santha took a great many while we were there—I find myself unpersuaded by Lohmann’s argument. First of all (see Plate 40), this column drum is not “hidden underneath soil or behind something else.” It’s in plain view in the lowest visible course of the wall, and it does stick out like a sore thumb. It’s made of a distinctively different, much darker, stone and it has a very different “look” from any neighboring block. It is quite unique in fact. Secondly, as to the precision, I don’t agree with Lohmann that the column drum cannot be an Arab repair. In Plates 42 and 43 the reader will find an example of another column drum which is certainly part of an Arab repair to the walls of Baalbek and its precision is as good as that on the column drum in the foundations. Another possibility I’ve considered—that it could be a Roman repair to a pre-Roman wall—also remains very much in play. If the lower block which this improvised block replaced had been badly damaged, and a decision had been made to remove it, the two small rectangular blocks above it (the ones Lohmann said “would fall, causing further instability for the structures above”) would have had to be removed at the same time.
But the next course up is so set that none of the other blocks in it would have fallen, nor would any instability have been caused to the huge megalith in the course above that, which is supported on no less than five large horizontal blocks, three of which would be entirely unaffected by the removal of the two smaller blocks below, while the other two would have been held in place by “frictional connection.” Once the column drum had been cut to shape and put in place at ground level, the two smaller blocks could have been slid back into the wall above it, completing a very neat and effective repair.
There’s something else, a fundamental area of disagreement, concerning what I see as a U-shaped megalithic wall surrounding Podium 1, but that Lohmann sees as the first courses of Podium 2. He tells me that “aside from the size of the ashlars” what I call a U-shaped megalithic wall is “the bottom of a standard shape of a Roman temple podium after Augustus times.” He asks me to take a look at the podium of the Maison Carée in Nimes,65 and suggests that the Temple of Bacchus in Baalbek itself also has a similar podium.66 He sends me links to photographs. “If you zoom in,” he writes, “you can see the stones of the second layer above the bottom layer, corresponding to the Trilithon.”
My reply:
You write that the megalithic podium for the Temple of Jupiter, though obviously on a very different scale, is the “standard shape of a Roman temple podium” but I’m not sure I see that from the pix you linked to. I attach here one of ours from the Temple of Bacchus … (same angle as the one you sent67). It shows a podium with a single straight side (apart from the lip at top and bottom), whereas the podium of the Temple of Jupiter gives more of a stepped effect with the row of huge megalithic blocks, that according to our correspondence form part of the lowest layer of the Julio-Claudian Temple podium, stepped out very far from the sheer wall above them, on top of which stood the peristasis. I suppose the resemblance would be better if the megalithic layer had been completed and extended all the way up to the top of the wall, but the peristasis would still have been set back a few meters from the top, instead of pretty much flush with the top as it is in the Temple of Bacchus. In short, when I zoom in to the Temple of Bacchus podium I don’t really see blocks, regardless of scale, that correspond with the Trilithon blocks. Am I missing something obvious here?68
I also ask: “Have you found organic materials with good provenance anywhere in ‘Podium 2’ and have you done carbon dating on these?”69
On the carbon dating Lohmann replies that “unfortunately” none had been done:
The history of constant change in the building, as well as deep excavation levels of the past 100 years have left no archaeological or organic material at all that would help us with this.70
In its own way this is quite a revelation to me, since it means—to deploy an appropriate metaphor—that the entire edifice of archaeological chronology for the so-called “Julio-Claudian podium”—Podium 2—of the Temple of Jupiter, rests on foundations in which there is no scientific dating evidence whatsoever. This is not to say that radiocarbon dates for archaeological sites are unproblematic! As we’ve seen in earlier chapters, they are often very problematic indeed—unless it can be demonstrated, as is the case at Göbekli Tepe, that the dated organic remains have been “sealed” at a particular moment and there is no possibility of subsequent intrusion of later materials that might give a falsely young date.
But there are simply no carbon dates, problematic or not, for Podium 2. It follows, therefore, that the orthodox chronology of this incredibly interesting and peculiar structure is based entirely on stylistic factors—that certain styles of building can be associated with specific cultures and specific periods and that the “style” seen in Podium 2 is entirely appropriate to the “Julio-Claudian” epoch of Roman construction.
It’s my view that the stylistic argument at Baalbek is nowhere near as clear-cut as it should be, given how much of our understanding of the site depends on it. And in response to my question about the positioning of the peristasis (i.e. of the four-sided porch or hall of columns surrounding the cella—the inner building—of the temple), Lohmann admits there is a stylistic anomaly:
yes, normally the peristasis would rest on the edge of the podium, as it does at the Bacchus temple. That would be following the Roman examples. (Mars-Ultor at the Roman Forum was a milestone building for that71). It is one of the oddities of Jupiter.72
On the other hand, Lohmann points out, temples do exist where the peristasis is set back in the way he envisages it would ultimately have been at Baalbek if Podium 2 had ever been completed—for example, the Bel temple in Palmyra, the temple of Zeus in Aizanoi, Turkey, and the colossal temple in Tarsos, Turkey. “In my opinion,” he writes:
this is due to the fact that both Bel temple, and Jupiter in Baalbek, were built onto older podia (Herodian in Baalbek, Hellenistic in Palmyra), and had to find a solution how to squeeze a first-century, latest-fashion Roman podium underneath the (even only slightly) older temple building. Baalbek’s terrace was immensely high, so the podium needed to be colossal, and in Palmyra the peristasis was already standing, so the podium was erected at a distance.73
Further, Lohmann stands his ground on the issue of the shape of Podium 2 which, despite its incompleteness, he sees as being quite normal:
a standard podium consists of a bottom profile (lip, as you call it), the “shaft” or the vertical part (that’s the trilithon layer in Baalbek…) and a top lip layer …74
He attaches an architectural diagram of the podium of Hosn Niha, another Roman temple in Lebanon, to make his point.75 To my eye, however, it looks astonishingly unlike Podium 2 at Baalbek and the layer in it that he wants me to compare to the Trilithon is just 1.58 meters (5 feet 3 inches) high, whereas the Trilithon, as we’ve seen, is 4.34 meters (14 feet 3 inches) high.
As I’ve already noted, I think Daniel Lohmann makes a strong case, but nothing in our correspondence proves to me that the U-shaped megalithic wall (that surrounds, but that does not support, Podium 1 on which the Temple of Jupiter in fact stands) is the work of the Romans. He could be right. But he could also be wrong and, in context of all the other indications from around the world of a lost civilization, I think it wise to keep an open mind on Baalbek.
Finally, however, it’s what I see in the quarry that convinces me of this, because we have to ask ourselves why three huge blocks in the range of 1,000 to 1,650 tons were left there at a
ll.
The conventional answer is that the Romans, having quarried these exceptionally large blocks, found that they could not move them and simply abandoned them. But that explanation makes very little sense. If the argument that the Romans were responsible for the U-shaped megalithic wall is correct, then we know that they went on to build an extensive temple complex dedicated to Jupiter using smaller blocks of stone. Surely their first source for the multiple smaller blocks they needed would have been the huge megaliths that, according to the argument of mainstream archaeology, they had discovered they could not move from the quarry? The Romans were practical people, who would not allow work that they had already so painstakingly done to go to waste. Rather than opening up fresh quarry faces, wouldn’t they have used those massive, already almost completely quarried 1,000-ton-plus blocks and simply sliced them up into smaller, more moveable megaliths for the construction of the rest of the temple?
It’s really puzzling that they didn’t do so and therefore the fact that these gigantic, almost finished blocks remain in the quarry, and were never sliced up into smaller blocks and used in the general construction of the Temple of Jupiter, suggests to me very strongly that the Romans did not even know they were there—just as the German Archaeological Institute, despite a hundred years of excavations, didn’t know until 2014 that a third massive block was there. In due course, I’m told, “good new information about the dating and practicalities of the quarry megaliths” may be forthcoming, but that information was not available at the time of writing.76 I await it with interest, but also with some doubt as to whether it will settle anything or simply raise further questions.
We are a species with amnesia. The devastating comet impacts that set the Younger Dryas in train 12,800 years ago and that caused two episodes of global flooding, one at the beginning and one at the end of the Younger Dryas, made us forget so much. The recovery of memory from the fragments that remain is logistically difficult and psychologically painful—as the complexities and decades of disputes around Baalbek show. But messages still reach us from the deep and distant past in the words of the Sages, in the deeds of the magicians, and in the mighty memorials that they left behind to awaken us at the time of the Great Return.
Magicians of the Gods Page 28