The Baldwins Challenge
In 1996, I posed
the problem of the Baalbek stones to Baldwins Industrial Services - one of
the leading crane hire companies in Britain. I asked them how they might
attempt to move the 1,000-ton Stone of the South and place it at the same
height as the Trilithon.
Although it is sometimes claimed that modern cranes cannot lift stones
as heavy as 800-tons,[9] this is actually incorrect. Bob MacGrain, the
Technical Director of Baldwins, confirmed that there were several mobile
cranes that could lift and place the 1,000-ton stone on a support
structure 20 feet high. Baldwins themselves operate a 1,200 ton capacity
Gottwald AK912 strut jib crane,[10] whilst other companies operate cranes
which can lift 2,000 tons. Unfortunately, however, these cranes do not
have the capability to actually move whilst carrying such heavy loads.
How, then, might we transport the Stone of the South to the Baalbek
acropolis?
Baldwins suggested two possibilities. The first would use a 1,000-ton
capacity crane fitted with crawler tracks. The disadvantage of this method
would be the need for massive ground preparation works - to provide a
solid, level roadway for the crane to move.
The alternative to a crane would be a series of modular hydraulic
trailers, combined to create a massive load carrying platform. These
trailers raise and lower their loads using hydraulic cylinders built into
their suspension. The initial lift at the quarry would be achieved by the
use of a cut-out section beneath the stone, which the trailer would drive
into. The final positioning in the wall, at a height of 20 feet, would be
achieved by using an earth ramp.
This is all very interesting, and gives us some feel for the scale of
the engineering challenge, but there is, of course, one slight problem
with the Baldwins scenario, namely that none of this twentieth century
technology was supposedly available when Baalbek was built.
The Puzzle of Baalbek
Here is a
fascinating question. Why did the builders of the Trilithon struggle with
800-ton weights when it would have been far easier to split the giant
monoliths into smaller blocks? Why not use 4 x 200-ton stones rather than
a cumbersome 800-tonner?
According to my engineer-friends, it was very risky to use 800-ton
blocks in the way seen at Baalbek. This is because any vertical defects
running lengthwise through the stone might have led to a critical
structural weakness. In contrast, a similar fault in a smaller block would
not have affected the overall construction. Either the builder was
incompetent and just plain lucky or he was competent and supremely
confident in his materials.
Whichever way we look at it, however, it makes no sense to imagine tens
of thousands of men struggling to move and erect three of these monstrous
800-ton stones.
So the question is "why did they not split the stones?".
One possible answer to this puzzle is that the builders moved the
stones in huge sizes simply because they could. In other words, it might
have been the case that, with a high technology available, the builders
found it more expeditious to cut and move one large stone rather than
several smaller ones. This presupposes the kind of high-tech 'lost
civilisation' which has been mooted by writers such as Bauval, Hancock and
West, or the more plausible 'lost race' as advocated by myself in 'The
Phoenix Solution' (1998).[11]
The Megalomaniac Theory
What possible
motive could there have been for the Romans to drag three shapeless stone
blocks, weighing 800-tons each, and place them into the wall of a
structure in a remote region of the Roman empire?
Here is a possible scenario. Let us imagine that the distant Roman
empire wished to stamp its authority on one of the most sacred sites of
the Near East. Let's say an instruction was issued from the central
bureaucracy to erect the world's largest temple. An over-zealous Roman
governor at Baalbek then conceived a temple plan on an unimaginable scale
and ordered the local people to comply. Thousands of workers were drafted
in from all around the Bekaa Valley. Then, as the platform neared
completion, even bigger stones were dragged to the site. The workers
became exhausted, time and resources became a problem, and the megalithic
layer was abandoned. A new official then arrived and blew the whistle,
stopped the brutality and brought a sense of realism to the enterprise;
the order was thus given for a massive down-grading of the yet-to-be-built
temples.
This is a purely hypothetical and imaginative scenario, and there is a
problem with it, because there is no historical evidence for it. Where,
for example, is the record of a megalomaniac Roman governor at Baalbek?
Surely such a man would have been notorious for one of the greatest acts
of folly ever witnessed. And yet we find no recollection of this mad
dictator among the Romans and no recollection where we would most expect
to find it - in the legends of the local people...
