The Great Stones of Baalbek: The Thousand-Ton Blocks No One Can Explain
In the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, on a site the ancients called Heliopolis, the City of the Sun, there stand the ruins of one of the most staggering temple complexes of the old world. Great Roman temples once rose here in honor of Jupiter and other gods, their soaring columns among the largest ever raised. But it is not the columns, magnificent as they are, that have made Baalbek a byword for mystery. It is the stones beneath them — and above all a handful of colossal cut blocks whose sheer, almost incomprehensible size has baffled engineers, archaeologists, and travelers for centuries. Buried in the foundations of the temple platform, and lying still in the ancient quarry nearby, are some of the largest building blocks ever shaped by human hands: monoliths weighing hundreds and even upward of a thousand tons apiece. How they were cut, moved, and, in some cases, lifted into place high off the ground, remains a genuine and unresolved puzzle, and it has made the great stones of Baalbek on...