Showing posts with label Baalbek. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Baalbek. Show all posts

Friday, February 13, 2009

Giants



Louis made me do it...hahah.

Wise old Nestor was a young boy at the time of the first Olympic games in 776 BC and in his 90s in 687 BC at the fall of Troy.

The Iliad, Book I, (247-269):

...and between them Nestor the fair-spoken rose up, the lucid speaker of Pylos, from whose lips the streams of words ran sweeter than honey. In his time two generations of mortal men had perished, those who had grown up with him and they who had been born to these in sacred Pylos, and he was king in the third age.

He in kind intention toward both stood forth and addressed them: 'Oh, for shame. Great sorrow comes to the land of Achaia. Now might Priam in truth be happy, and all the rest of the Trojans be visited in their hearts with gladness, were they to hear all this wherein you two are quarreling, you who surpass all Danaans in council, in fighting. Yet be persuaded. Both of you are younger than I am.

Yes, and in my time I have dealt with better men than you are, and never once did they disregard me. Never yet have I seen nor shall again see men as these were, men like Peirithoös, and Dryas, shepherd of the people, Kaineus and Exadios, godlike Polyphemos, or Theseus, Aigeus' son, in the likeness of the immortals. These were the strongest generation of earth-born mortals, the strongest, and they fought against the strongest, the beast men living within the mountains, and terribly they destroyed them. I was in the company of these men...
And also from Hebrew sources: Genesis 6

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,

6:2 That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.

6:3 And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.

6:4 There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
Numbers 13:33, "And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight."

And from Velikovsky: Giants.

The traditions of peoples all over the world are quite unanimous in asserting that an an earlier time a race of giants lived on the earth, that most of the race were destroyed in great catastrophes; that they were of cruel nature and were furiously fighting among themselves; that the last of them were exterminated when after a cataclysm a migration of peoples brought the forebears of the peoples of today to their new homelands.

The Japanese narrate that when their forefathers after a great catastrophe about two and a half or three thousand years ago, came from the continent and invaded the isles, they found there long-legged, furry giants. These giants were called Ainu. The forefathers of the Japanese were defeated in the first encounter, but in the second encounter they were victorious.

Ixtlilxochitl described the wandering of peoples of the western hemisphere in the four ages of the world. The first age came to its end in the Flood. In the second age, called “the sun of the earthquake,” there lived the generation of the giants, which was destroyed in the cataclysm that terminated this age. The third period was “the sun of the wind,” called so because at the end of this period terrible hurricanes annihilated everything. The new inhabitants of the new world were Ulme and Xicalauca who came from the east to find a foothold at Potouchan: here they met a number of giants, the last survivors of the second catastrophe. The fourth age was called “the fire sun,” because of the great fire that put an end to this epoch. At that time the Toltecs arrived in the land of Anahuac, put to flight by the catastrophe: they wandered for 104 years before they settled in their new home.

Also F. L. Gomara in his Conquista de Mexico, in the chapter about “cinco soles que son edades,” wrote:

The second sun perished when the sky fell upon the earth; the collapse killed all the people and every living thing; and they say that giants lived in those days, and that to them belong the bones that our Spaniards have found while digging mines and tombs. From their measure and proportion it seems that those men were twenty hands tall—a very great stature, but quite certain.(1)

Thursday, February 12, 2009

The Mystery of Baalbek



Could this be what Sonchis of Sais was referring to in Plato's Timaeus?

Are these the remains of Pelasgians who defeated the Atlanteans?

Did our ancestors have advanced technology?

Did the ancients surmise these stones lifted by Giants, Gigantes, Cyclopes, Titans, Nephilim, Rephaim, Anakim?



Sacred Sites: Baalbek, Lebanon.

The great mystery of the ruins of Baalbek, and indeed one of the greatest mysteries of the ancient world, concerns the massive foundation stones beneath the Roman Temple of Jupiter. The courtyard of the Jupiter temple is situated upon a platform, called the Grand Terrace, which consists of a huge outer wall and a filling of massive stones. The lower courses of the outer wall are formed of huge, finely crafted and precisely positioned blocks. They range in size from thirty to thirty three feet in length, fourteen feet in height and ten feet in depth, and weigh approximately 450 tons each. Nine of these blocks are visible on the north side of the temple, nine on the south, and six on the west (others may exist but archaeological excavations have thus far not dug beneath all the sections of the Grand Terrace). Above the six blocks on the western side are three even larger stones, called the Trilithon, whose weight exceeds 1000 tons each. These great stones vary in size between sixty-three and sixty-five feet in length, with a height of fourteen feet six inches and a depth of twelve feet.

Another even larger stone lies in a limestone quarry a quarter of a mile from the Baalbek complex. Weighing an estimated 1200 tons, it is sixty-nine feet by sixteen feet by thirteen feet ten inches, making it the single largest piece of stonework ever crafted in the world. Called the Hajar el Gouble, the Stone of the South, or the Hajar el Hibla, the Stone of the Pregnant Woman, it lays at a raised angle with the lowest part of its base still attached to the quarry rock as though it were almost ready to be cut free and transported to its presumed location next to the other stones of the Trilithon.

Why these stones are such an enigma to contemporary scientists, both engineers and archaeologists alike, is that their method of quarrying, transportation and precision placement is beyond the technological ability of any known ancient or modern builders. Various ‘scholars’, uncomfortable with the notion that ancient cultures might have developed knowledge superior to modern science, have decided that the massive Baalbek stones were laboriously dragged from the nearby quarries to the temple site. While carved images in the temples of Egypt and Mesopotamia do indeed give evidence of this method of block transportation - using ropes, wooden rollers and thousands of laborers - the dragged blocks are known to have been only 1/10th the size and weight of the Baalbek stones and to have been moved along flat surfaces with wide movement paths. The route to the site of Baalbek, however, is up hill, over rough and winding terrain, and there is no evidence whatsoever of a flat hauling surface having been created in ancient times.

Next there is the problem of how the mammoth blocks, once they were brought to the site, were lifted and precisely placed in position. It has been theorized that the stones were raised using a complex array of scaffolding, ramps and pulleys which was powered by large numbers of humans and animals working in unison. An historical example of this method has been suggested as the solution for the Baalbek enigma. The Renaissance architect Domenico Fontana, when erecting a 327-ton Egyptian obelisk in front of St Peter's Basilica in Rome, used 40 huge pulleys, which necessitated a combined force of 800 men and 140 horses. The area where this obelisk was erected, however, was a great open space that could easily accommodate all the lifting apparatus and the men and horses pulling on the ropes. No such space is available in the spatial context of how the Baalbek stones were placed. Hills slope away from where lifting apparatus would need to have been placed and no evidence has been found of a flat and structurally firm surface having been constructed (and then mysteriously removed after the lifting was done). Furthermore, not just one obelisk was erected but rather a series of giant stones were precisely put in place side-by-side. Due to the positioning of these stones, there is simply no conceivable place where a huge pulley apparatus could have been stationed.

Archaeologists, unable to resolve the mysteries of the transportation and lifting of the great blocks, rarely have the intellectual honesty to admit their ignorance of the matter and therefore focus their attention solely on redundant measurements and discussions regarding the verifiable Roman-era temples at the site. Architects and construction engineers, however, not having any preconceived ideas of ancient history to uphold, will frankly state that there are no known lifting technologies even in current times that could raise and position the Baalbek stones given the amount of working space. The massive stones of the Grand Terrace of Baalbek are simply beyond the engineering abilities of any recognized ancient or contemporary builders.

There are several other matters about the Baalbek stones that further confound archaeologists and conventional theories of prehistoric civilization. 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 or the dates and names of the benefactors, designers, architects, engineers and builders of the Grand Terrace. 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 construction dates from a far earlier age.
Guess what it would require to lift one of those Trilithon stones?