Just how do you build a temple in the mountains when there was no power?
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Ultra-heavy lifting is not just a speciality for modern firms. Somehow they did it 3000 years ago...
When we think of the machines and methods used to build the modern Middle East, we generally tend to think of the developments that happened over the last thirty years or so.
However, the role of the ancient developers cannot be understated – those pyramids didn’t build themselves.
Closer to home, some of the most important construction methods came out of the Middle East at least a thousand years before Romulus and Remus started master-planning their ‘Rome’ project.
Technology developed in the region at this time included concepts of town planning, toilets, sewers and large-scale brick making. In fact it is said that when mankind first left caves and tent dwelling behind, it was Mespotamia (southern Iraq) where the first known permanent houses were built some ten thousand years ago.
Ancient people in what is now Iraq also had technology, for reasons that have become lost in time. It is known that they had developed a sort of wet-cell battery, using copper and the same tin solder used in modern batteries. What we don’t understand is why they had this – there are only veiled references to what the ancients might have been using electricity for.
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What we do know is that they must have used some pretty heavy cranes, powered by something. In the Lebanese town of Baalbek, there are the remains of some early Roman temples, which is not surprising for the region, but what is of great curiosity is the stones used.
The three largest building blocks ever used in a man-made structure sit side by side on the fifth level of a wall, yet they have been placed with millimeter accuracy. Even the largest of Dubai’s mobile crane fleet would struggle with such a weight today, so we can only speculate what kind of machinery was employed all those years ago.
Even more extraordinary is the fact that in a limestone quarry about one quarter of a mile away from temple is an even larger building block. According to a book by the author Andrew Collins, the dressed rock is known as Hajar el Gouble, the Stone of the South, or the Hajar el Hibla, the Stone of the Pregnant Woman; it weighs an estimated 1200 tonnes. It lies at a raised angle - the lowest part of its base still attached to the living rock - cut and ready to be broken free and transported to its presumed destination next to the other stones.
So how did they move it? Well, nobody really knows. Neither the ancients, nor the Greeks or Romans kept many engineering records, although Aristotle did write ‘Mechanica’, which described some lifting methods including compound pulley systems.
Other stones from the same time show tong marks and holes for Lewis irons, so it is reasonable to presume that a beast or human powered crane with a pulley arrangement was used, though it still doesn’t explain how so much weight was moved.
For the very heavy stones, it is thought some sort of giant treadmil was used, but perhaps we’ll never know.
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