Baalbek Trilithon Stones

Baalbek Trilithon Stones are three huge stone blocks set side by side in the podium wall of the Roman temple of Jupiter Heliopolitanus at Baalbek, in Lebanon. Baalbek was also known as Heliopolis. It lies near the center of the Bekaa Valley, between the Lebanon Mountains to the west and the Anti-Lebanon range to the east. Each block weighs about 880 tons (800 metric tons). Six columns of the Temple of Jupiter still stand, and the nearby Temple of Bacchus is better preserved.

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The three stones

Each block is about 62 feet (19 meters) long, and published figures give a height of about 13 feet (4 meters) or more and a thickness of 10 to 12 feet (3 to 3.6 meters). Estimates of each block's weight run from about 830 tons (750 metric tons) to more than a thousand tons. They are the heaviest blocks in the structure, and Jean-Pierre Adam, in a 1977 study of how the megaliths were moved and set, judged so great a mass of stones this size unique in all antiquity. Their wall, the outer megalithic part of the podium, was built after the temple's central podium and rises in courses of ever larger stones. Only the southwest side of this outer wall was completed. The Syriac church history of Pseudo-Zacharias of Mytilene describes "three wonderful stones" there.

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The quarry

At least three more enormous blocks still lie in the ancient quarry, some 2,600 to 3,000 feet (800 to 900 meters) southwest of the temple. One of them is known locally as Hajar al-Hibla, the Stone of the Pregnant Woman. Adam put one quarry block at 1,070 tons (970 metric tons), more than the Trilithon blocks' average of about 880 tons (800 metric tons). In 2014 archaeologists found the edge of another monolith in the quarry. The quarry lies slightly higher than the temple, so blocks for the lower courses could move down a gentle slope. Adam proposed that men turning capstans hauled each block on cedar-wood rollers over a timber causeway, which was raised with each finished course so that no block had to be lifted. Adam also judged that the problem of moving the stones had too long drawn the wildest proposals.

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Who built it and when

Work on the sanctuary ran into the second century AD. A stonemason's graffito on top of one of the columns suggests that putting them up was almost finished in AD 60. Daniel Lohmann, an architect who re-measured the building, holds that the temple was probably consecrated under the emperor Domitian. When the work began is debated. For a long time the most accepted view dated the whole building to the Julio-Claudian emperors. Adam placed it in a building program of Claudius and Nero. Lohmann dates the start of the work to a Herodian initiative after 15 BC. Giulio Magli, an archaeoastronomer at the Politecnico di Milano, holds that the architects of Herod the Great began the temple, pointing to likenesses with the Herodian walls of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, though Baalbek lay outside Herod's kingdom. The megalithic building technique itself is now firmly dated to the imperial period.

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Baalbek and the Bible

The temple's god, Jupiter Heliopolitanus, is usually identified with Hadad, a storm god. Magli, however, treats him as a form of the Roman Jupiter and holds that the idea of a "Heliopolitan Triad" lacks solid evidence. Hadad in turn was probably equated with Baal, whom Scripture presents chiefly as the Canaanite god who controlled rain and fertility. Baalbek's name contains Baal's and has been explained as Lord of the Bekaa. Magli judges that a sanctuary of the Hellenistic period probably stood on the site before the Roman one. In the nineteenth century, biblical archaeologists proposed that Baalbek was Baal-gad, the limit of Joshua's conquests "in the Valley of Lebanon at the foot of Mount Hermon" (Joshua 11:17). Baal-gad's exact site is unknown, but it lay below Mount Hermon, not far from Dan, and Hasbaya has been proposed. Others placed Baalbek in the "Valley of Aven" of the oracle against Damascus (Amos 1:5). Later writers credited the temple complex to Solomon, and the same church history says that "Scripture mentions that Solomon built it and stored arms in it". Solomon reigned from 970 to 931 BC, about a thousand years before the Roman temple was built.