What the Romans Wrought in Lebanon

adminAugust 1, 2009UncategorisedComments are off for this post

Written by Melik Kaylan,

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A first glimpse of Baalbeck’s six 72-feet-high Corinthian columns will instantly raise your spirits and turn unease into adventure. Like the Parthenon or the Pyramids, the Baalbeck complex is one of the glorious monuments of history. No matter which angle you look from, the two lofty temples—to Jupiter and to Bacchus—seem to ride the sky and will intoxicate your faculties. You will know how it feels to be a besotted idolater.

The site sits astride a north-south thoroughfare of history, being the place where trouble flowing down from the north (Syria) meets trouble coming up from the coast (Beirut). In recent years, the Bekaa Valley was home to guerrilla training camps. The Lebanese Civil War shut down the annual Baalbeck International Festival—and its presentations of music, dance and theater—from 1975 to 1996. The Hezbollah-Israel war did the same for a year in 2006. Nowadays, when the festival is in full swing a shop set into the ancient walls sells Hezbollah banners and T-shirts.

Through the millennia, the Romans took Baalbeck from the Greeks in the first century B.C. and built the temples; the Christians took it from the pagans in the third century and closed the place; the Arabs took it from the Byzantines in 636 and turned it into a fortress. And successive Caliphates manned it, followed by the Mamelukes, Mongols and Timurids, until the Ottomans took over in 1517 and held it for five centuries. In the 19th century, Baalbeck was a stop on the Grand Tour of the ancient world. Mark Twain wrote in his travel memoir “Innocents Abroad” that “such grandeur of design, and such grace of execution, as one sees in the temples of Baalbeck, have not been equaled or even approached in any work of men’s hands that has been built within twenty centuries past.”

Countless such eminences occupied rooms overlooking the ruins at the nearby Palmyra Hotel. The hotel is still there, as are its visitors books with the signatures of such world leaders as Kaiser Wilhelm. He launched the first restoration project of Baalbeck in 1898 as part of his long courtship of the Ottoman Empire, his later allies on the losing side of World War I.

Baalbeck’s name derives from the Phoenician God Baal, of biblical fame, to whom the site was first consecrated around the first millennium B.C. as a center for healing. The surrounding area exuded fecundity in the form of hashish, poppy and grape—it was only five years ago that the Lebanese army finally destroyed the illicit opium and hashish crop so dear to militia financiers. Vineyards flourish still, even Muslim ones, as long as they sell to Christians who make the wine. In antiquity, the sedative and healing powers of the soil became the identifying features of the gods.

The Romans brusquely leveled, enlarged and reordered the site beginning in the last quarter of the first century B.C. It took them 250 years to complete their project, and a mere 50 years later the Christians shut the temples down. The work was mostly done by slaves from around the empire—10 generations of them perished on the job, some 100,000 souls.

Today, you can still get a wonderfully stentorian official guide to take you around. He will certainly complain at some point that the Lebanese government has done no restoration since the Civil War years. Yet the work done before by German, French and Lebanese archaeologists immensely enhanced the sights that so dazzled Twain. Of the two big temples, the Jupiter Temple is the less well restored but the more famous and magnificent. As you ascend into a plateau of courtyards, your senses are both ordered and uplifted by the graduated precision of the layout—the Hexagonal Forecourt, then the Great Court and finally the soaring six standing columns left of a colonnade that encircled the main sanctuary where Jupiter abided, to which only priests had access. Progressing through, one sees the massive stone altar on which they performed ritual sacrifices, the pools where they first prewashed the animals, all girded spaciously by semicircular walls with decorative niches for statues. The Romans, one feels, captured the sky in Baalbeck’s sublime enclosures, but Jupiter’s presence feels more palpable for being more air than enclosure among the ruins.

Nearby, the Temple of Bacchus seems barely altered by time from its original monolithic state. Hemmed in by a rectangle of almost perfectly preserved 42-foot colonnades, the whole is raised on a solid stone base 16½ feet high. The lofty monumental gate atop 33 stone steps lures the eye to a cool, dreamy interior. The doorjambs display complex carved images that indicate the temple’s mysterious functions with grape and poppy, alpha and omega symbols. A carved depiction of cupid without arrows tells of Bacchus’s transsexual identity. Along the building’s side, a bas-relief of Octavian, Anthony and Cleopatra warns the onlooker of the fate of anyone defying Rome’s power. The entire edifice has a sealed, secretive air of undecoded mysteries, as befits a temple dedicated to the god of trances.

There is a great deal more to see at or near Baalbeck’s site—from the small Venus Temple to other minor structures raised by Christians and Mamelukes and Ommayads. Nearby, at the ancient local quarry, the biggest stone ever quarried, at 1,200 tons, sits unused. By that point in your visit you will notice the man in jeans with a headscarf masking his face who has followed you around for some time, intermittently muttering into a device near his mouth. He is the votary of an entirely different cult.

—Mr. Kaylan, a columnist for Forbes, writes about culture and the arts for the Journal.