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ACT to foster happiness, peace, prosperity, and tolerance in the Middle East
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Baalbeck
The great temple at Baalbeck or Heliopolis has
stood since the beginning of our era when it was one of the wonders of the
world. It and the second temple, with its cellar almost intact, make up one of
the most beautiful and famous of ancient monuments. Baalbeck is indeed a place
where the visitor can still recapture the fascination and atmosphere of the
past.
There are legends to explain its exceptional size, its gigantic proportions and
huge blocks, particularly the three which each measure between 19-20 m. by 4.50
m. by 3.60 m.
An even greater block still lies in the quarry. An archaeologist has declared
that this block alone would make a visit to Baalbeck worthwhile. For centuries
popular fancy connected the place with biblical figures, mankind before the
flood, with giants and djinns, and even recently an apparently serious scientist
attributed the platform on which the great temple stands to beings who had
landed from another planet in remote times.
Baalbeck suffered with the passage of time. Its history disappeared in legend and its temples became unrecognizable through Byzantine and mediaeval additions, ravages of war, earthquakes and vandalism. But now, thanks to the work of excavation, consolidation and restoration carried out since the beginning of the century, we can see the buildings of Baalbeck almost as they were in their prime with the later additions removed.
The way into the sanctuary is once more through the propylaea and hexagonal forecourt. The visitor now reaches the vast court of sacrifice, once encumbered by a Byzantine basilica, and now cleared to show its original state with the monumental altar and second altar flanked by ornamental pools for ritual washing. The court was surrounded by a sumptuous colonnade of 128 rose granite columns from Egypt set in front of a series of meticulously decorated exedrae. At the west end, the blocks of the great steps have been restored to their original position and now lead up the high platform of the temple of Jupiter. The six huge columns still standing with the entablature on top give a fair idea of the vast scale of the original building. Nearby, but entirely separate from the temple of Jupiter, is the temple of Bacchus complete except for its roof, part of the peristyle and the altar. The decoration of this temple is of an unparalleled richness and delicacy and is extremely well preserved.
Over the centuries these two temples, imposing, almost overwhelming in their grandeur, colossal and yet harmonious in design, have inspired fantasy and poetry to explain and describe their construction. Fancy has now given way to systematic examination and research which enable us to date the temples and to form a reasonably accurate idea of the spirit of the age that witnessed their construction.
The temple of Jupiter, the foundations of which are probably
pre-Roman, was completed soon after 60 A.D. The terrace which was planned to
surround the temple and to which the three famous blocks belong, dates from the
same period but was never finished. During the second century A.D. the grand
approach was planned and the great court built with colonnade and exedrae. The
temple of Bacchus was built about 150 A.D. The propylaea was added at the
beginning of the third century A.D. together with the small round temple and, in
the reign of Phillip the Arab (244-249 A.D.), the hexagonal forecourt.
A construction of such vast proportions could never have been the work of one
city or even one province. The enormous energy and outlay needed could only be
provided by imperial Rome as part of the emperors' eastern policy to unite the
indigenous peoples and the Roman colonial population in the same faith and in
worship of the same gods. This policy for religion was made possible by an
existing tendency to group deities together. Hadad, the eastern god of thunder
and storms, the god who gives rain, known from one dedication as the Lebanese
god, had already been identified at Baalbeck with the sun, and the city was
called Heliopolis - the city of the sun - Hellenistic times. At that time the
gods of Baalbeck were given Greek names. Under the Roman empire they simply took
on Roman citizenship. Hadad became Jupiter Heliopolitanus, the great goddess was
called Venus Heliopolitana and the little god of spring turned into Mercury.
This triad was extraordinarily popular, and we are reminded of this at Baalbeck.
Altars dedicated to the Heliopolitan triad are found, not only in the eastern
provinces, but throughout the whole Roman world, from the Balkans to Spain, Gaul
and Scotland. The popularity of this cult was partly due to the grafting of
mystic ceremonies onto ancient rural rites, and the temple of Bacchus may have
been built for the celebration of mysteries. It should, however, be emphasized
that beneath the tendency to merge cults, in spite of the varying aspects of the
deities and changes in their names or representations, the cult of the
Heliopolitan triad was always Phoenician in essence, an essence reflected in the
monuments we see today.
What is most striking on first sight is, of course, the
western character of the architecture and decoration. ''One might think the
monuments had been made in Rome, labeled and packed for export, and reassembled
at Baalbeck like a jig-saw puzzle''. And yet, in spite of what looks like a
mania for columns, Corinthian capitals, western architectural devices and
classical ornament, the essential part of the ancient traditions is still
present. It is present in the representations of the deities, one of which can
be seen in the forecourt. It is present, too, in the layout of the sanctuary,
for in the succession of propylaea, forecourt and sacrificial court we are
reminded of the temple at Jerusalem with its sequence of courts for gentiles,
the faithful and priests. The great court, containing the main installations of
the cult, is typical of the Semitic tradition. The temple is western, the great
court itself is surrounded by a Corinthian colonnade, but there is no parallel
in the western world for the altar, which stood eighteen meters high facing the
entrance to the temple. The traditional rites and ceremonies forced the Roman
builders to accept its positions, and it is probable that the sacrifices on the
roofs mentioned in the Bible were performed on the platform of the great altar.
In the temple of Bacchus the stairs on either side of the magnificent doorway
may have fulfilled some ritual requirement. This temple has a dwelling of the
god, a holy of holies, raised as a separate part of the building at the end of
the cella, and visible as an edicule within the temple. This long-established
dwelling of the god or of his image did not disappear in Roman times. It became
the Lebanese adyton.
Baalbeck is more than a fascinating group of ruins of awe-inspiring majesty. It
is a place where east and west have met and merged, a crossroad where different
influences and beliefs have come together in mutual understanding, as in Lebanon
today.
