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Updated: June 15, 2025
His first meeting with the ruler of Baalbek after the breakfast they had had together, set all doubts finally at rest, because the Prince received him with a friendship which was unmistakable. The physician apologised for being overcome by the potency of the wine, and pleaded that he had hitherto been unused to liquor of such strength.
From Baalbek, the city of "Baal of the Bek'a," the traveller makes his way across Lebanon, and under the snows of Jebel Sannîn nearly 9000 feet in height to the old Phoenician city of Beyrout. Beyrout is already mentioned in the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna under the name of Beruta or Beruna, "the cisterns."
Baalbek lay like a city of the dead, the splendid architecture of its countless temples gleaming ghostlike, cold, white and unreal in the pure refulgence of the moon. Occasionally the ambassador paused in his walk and leaned on the parapet.
Baalbek was the sacred city of the Bek'a, or "cleft" formed between Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon by the gorge through which the river Litâny rushes down to the sea. Once and once only is it referred to in the Old Testament.
The ruins of another magnificent provincial Roman temple exist at Baalbek the ancient Heliopolis in Syria, not far from Damascus. This building was erected during the time of the Antonines, probably by Antoninus Pius himself, and originally it must have been of very extensive dimensions, the portico alone being 180 ft. long and about 37 ft. deep.
Down below the Pump Room our travellers explored the memories of the days when the world was Latin from York to the Tigris, and the Corinthian capital flourished like a weed from Bath to Baalbek.
It might well be that the party were seeking a route at once easy and unknown by which warriors from Damascus might fall upon Baalbek; yet, if this were the case, why did not the explorers return directly to Damascus rather than venture within the walls of Baalbek?
Many heights were truncated mounds of rock, resembling gigantic platforms with ruinous sides, such as are known in this Western land as mesas or buttes. They were Nature's enormous mockery of the most ambitious architecture of man, the pyramids of Egypt and the platform of Baalbek.
Then he wept and sighed and bemoaned himself, exclaiming, 'There is no resource against the ordinance of God neither is there any escape from that which He hath decreed! Then he went up to the roof and finding the strips of Baalbek stuff tied to the battlements and hanging down to the ground, knew that she had descended thence and had fled forth, as one distracted and mad with passion.
The method of construction of the domes, the great bearing-arches which relieve the architrave, the exterior niches which decorate the walls, and the architrave turned into an archivolt over the tympana of the pediments all occur at about this period. At Laodicea, Baalbek, Palmyra, and Petra, motifs which were in use till the end of the Byzantine period appear.
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