The Trilithon
The quest for the largest megaliths moved by man has brought us to the ancient land of Lebannon and the temple remains at Baalbek, City of the Sun. Archaeology reveals that settlement in the area of Baalbek dates back over 7,000 years, with the ruins we see today are largely dominated by the Roman temples but an ancient mystery lies beneath.
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| The Temple of Jupiter |
The six remaining columns were built on a podium 22 feet above the ground, possibly an un-roofed construction open to the elements. These massive six columns provide a glimpse of the vast scale of the original structure, measuring 157.5 feet in width and 288.7 feet in length. It has been suggested that the great columns, constructed of Aswan granite, appear to have been reworked from an earlier possibly Hellenistic style.
The Temple Podium supporting these massive columns was built of some of the most gigantic stones ever crafted and moved by man. At the side of the podium, incorporated into the west wall, known as the Grand Terrace, is the 'Trilithon', consisting of three enormous stones, raised 20 feet above the ground, each approximately 63 feet long, 13 feet wide, 13 feet high, weighing an estimated 800 – 1000 tons each, mounted on lower courses of blocks weighing around 350 - 400 tons each.
Today we marvel at the achievement of the Neolithic construction of Stonehenge, many visitors to the site on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, simply gape in awe at these stones, the heaviest estimated at 50 tons. Yet, the largest stones at Baalbek are some 20 times greater in weight than the largest stones used at Stonehenge. To date, the 'trilithon' stones are the largest megaliths known to have been moved by man found anywhere in the world.
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| Classic picture of Baalek showing the immense size of the Trilithon as compared to the two figures above it |
Certainly, there are no legends or folk tales from Roman times that link the Romans with the mammoth stones. There are absolutely no records in any Roman or other literary sources concerning the construction methods, dates or names of the designers, architects, or engineers who built of the Grand Terrace. No Emperor claims them.
The megalithic stones of the Trilithon bear no structural or ornamental resemblance to any of the Roman-era constructions above them, such as the previously described Temples of Jupiter, Bacchus or Venus. The limestone rocks of the Trilithon show extensive evidence of wind and sand erosion that is absent from the Roman temples, indicating that the megalithic Trilthon construction dates from a far earlier age.
Indeed, the great stones of Baalbek display evidence of erosion even older than the pre-Roman stone walls found throughout the ancient world, such as the Acropolis foundation in Athens, the foundations of Myceneae, and Tiryns, Delphi. These walls were seemingly in place prior to the rise of the great Greek civilisations, not knowing who built them their historians attributed the constructions to the mythical Cyclopes subsequently providing the term 'cyclopean masonry'; a seemingly jumbled arrangement of interlocking large stone blocks in perfect placement without mortar.
Cyclopean masonry is often associated with colonies of the Phoenicians. Significantly, the coastal strip of Lebannon was the Phoenician homeland, perhaps the earliest seafaring nation, who built up an immense maritime trade network over a thousand years that at its peak, from 1550BC to 300BC, spread across the Mediterranean. The Phoenicians were known to the Greeks and Romans as 'traders in purple', referring to their monopoly on the precious purple dye extracted from the Murex snail, used, among other things, for colouring royal clothing.
The original name 'phoinix' was a Greek invention and appears for the first time in the period of Homer and Hesiod, during the 9th - 7th centuries. The name, and it's derivatives, was used exclusively by the Greeks to describe these eastern people, but its root is neither Phoenician or Semitic and the etymological problem of the origin of the Greek word persists. Indeed, the Phoenicians are known from the 14th century BC as people who called themselves Canaanites. However, one of the meanings of the word 'phoinix' is 'red', no doubt an allusion to the purple textile industry; it has been suggested that Phoenicia could mean 'the country of purple cloth'.
Ancient Copper Trade
The Phoenicians are known to have ventured beyond the Pillars of Hercules, (the Straits of Gibraltar), and circumnavigated the African continent. Tin has been produced and traded in Cornwall since ancient times but from this period little is known. There are legends of the Phoenicians trading with the Cornish for tin. There are strong claims they ventured as far as Britain for Cornish tin, allied with copper an essential element in the Mediterranean Bronze Age. The 17th century writer Samuel Bochart suggested in his Geographic Sacra (1646) that the name of Britannia was first applied by the Phoenicians, in whose language 'Bartanac' signified 'the land of tin'.
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| Ox hide ingot |
The coast around the south west peninsula of Britain is littered with shipwrecks, many bearing evidence of the tin trade. In 1992, 42 tin ingots, were found in a wreck of a Roman context at Bigbury Bay, South Devon and the Royal Cornwall Museum houses a copper and tin ingot found off Looe Island (Lammana), Cornwall, authenticated as 2000 years old.
In 2009, a wreck was found in just eight metres of water on part of the seabed called Wash Gully, only 300 metres from the shore, in a bay near Salcombe, south Devon, by a team of amateur marine archaeologists from the South West Maritime Archaeological Group. Archaeologists have described the vessel, which is thought to date back to around 1200 - 900BC, the Phoenician period, as being a "bulk carrier" of its age. The recovered cargo included 259 copper ingots and 27 tin ingots, weighing a total of more than 84kg, in almost the exact proportion of tin ingots to copper ingots found to make bronze, with a composition of 10% tin and 90% copper. Further analysis on the provenance of the materials is required but initial thoughts amongst archaeologists is that the copper could have come from afar afield as the Iberian peninsular, Alpine Europe, especially modern day Switzerland, and possibly other locations in France, such as the Massif Central, and possibly Austria. It seems likely that the ship was collecting Cornish tin to deliver a complete bronze making package to its ultimate destination that it never reached due to the notorious currents off the Cornwall-Devon coast.
How far the Phoenicians ventured for raw materials is not known. Debate continues as to whether they crossed the Atlantic and ventured into the New World: evidence of a Phoenician presence in the Americas is vigorously denied by conventional historians as fakes and forgeries because it fails to fit with the accepted chronology of the peopling of the New World. Surely we should exercise caution here and not be too hasty in dismissing the possibility of early Atlantic crossings in prehistory. Recent studies have shown North American copper may have been used to supply the Mediterranean Bronze Age.
With the exception of a small amount of pre-Columbian bronze made in Peru, the New World never entered the Bronze Age. Copper was used for tools and ornaments sourced from the area of the Great Lakes in North America. Sites near Lake Superior are dotted with small pits, typically 15 to 20 feet in diameter but only 6 to 7 feet deep. About 5,000 of these copper mines have been identified, believed to have started between 7th to 5th millennium BC, with the major period of extraction between 3,000 and 1,200 BC. Therefore, North American copper mining was active during the peak of the Phoenician maritime trade network, from 1550BC to 300BC.
It has been claimed that up to 1 billion pounds of copper was extracted in the New World. This figure is seen as extremely high, the most conservative estimates suggesting somewhere in the region of 20 million pounds. Given the volume of ore removed and the likely concentration of metal it contained more recent estimates suggest a maximum of some 80 million pounds of copper.
Yet conventional wisdom asserts that the copper extracted from the Lake Superior mines was used to make artefacts from the so-called Old Copper culture, from which a total of some 20,000 objects are known to exist in museums and private collections, estimated to weigh around 10,000 pounds, a mere fraction of the total amount mined even if we accept the most conservative estimate of 20 million pounds. Where did all the copper go?
Ancient people across the world spent huge time and resources manufacturing tools and ornaments to be used in funerary rituals. Such was their belief in the afterlife, yet less than 10 per cent of Old Copper artefacts has been recovered from burials.
It has been suggested that the majority was shipped to the Old World to feed the Mediterranean Bronze Age. There may be some merit in this notion as copper was melted in the Mediterranean area into ingots shaped like a cured ox hide. Oddly, similar shaped copper ingots have been found in North American burial mounds.
Shipwrecks found in the Mediterranean have revealed evidence of trade in these ox hide ingots. In the early 1950s, divers found the remains of a shipwreck in Cape Gelidonya, off the coast of Turkey. Radiocarbon dating of brushwood from the ship provided a date c.1200 BC.
In 1982, a diver discovered a shipwreck off the shore of Uluburun, Turkey. Tree-ring dating of firewood from the ship yielded a date c.1300 BC. The ship contained 317 copper ingots in the normal oxhide shape, 36 with only two corner protrusions, 121 shaped like buns, and five shaped like pillows. After being cleaned of their corrosion the oxhide ingots were found to range in weight from 20.1 to 29.5 kg. The ship's cargo included tin oxhide ingots, and ivory, metal jewellery, and Canaanite pottery containing resin. The ship's load of ten tons of copper ingots, one ton of tin ingots, again in the correct proportions for the composition of bronze as with the wreck found near Salcombe, south Devon, and the resin stored in the Canaanite jars appear to be a complete package as all these materials were used for bronze casting through the lost-wax technique. It would seem these maritime metal merchants delivered all the sources required to order.
Analysis of the ingots from the two shipwrecks has revealed ore sources with a Middle East or Central Asian provenance; the destination of North American copper remains elusive.
Baalbek of the New World
Cyclopean walls are also found in the New World, such as at Cusco in Peru, attributed to the Incas, and megalithic constructions at Tiahuanaco has given the Bolivian ruins the name of the “Baalbek of the New World” for good reason. We find many similarities between the Old and New Worlds in ancient times.
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| The Twelve Angle Stone, Cusco |
The Phoenicians were famous for building coastal ports for extending their maritime trade network, why they should build an immense platform at an altitude of 1,170 metres (3,840 ft) in the mountains of Lebannon is baffling and does not fit with the concept of seaborne traders who's interests were in the opposite direction. The foundations at Baalbek would appear to be pre-Phoenician in design and purpose. It has been suggested that the Grand Terrace supported an un-roofed platform for ancient stargazers long before the Romans built their temple upon the site.
We have seen that a copper trade network established by the Phoenicians could certainly have reached the New World and is a distinct possibility. However, the megalithic constructions at Tiahuanaco have been dated to a much earlier age, long before the Phoenicians; a civilisation seems to have appeared in the New World 17,000 years ago with no apparent predecessors or evolution. Then disappeared again without trace.
Hand of the Cyclopes Part III: Celestial Wanderings
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