Brien Foerster Quotes

The sheer size of some of the limestome foundation blocks [at Baalbek] are the largest ever quarried on the planet, conservatively estimated at 800 to 1200 tons, and the common belief that the Romans chose to do this work on such a massive scale to 'impress the locals' is absolutely ludicrous. Nowhere else in the Roman world is there any evidence of the quarrying of blocks of this size, so we can clearly presume that they were there when the Romans first appeared, and were used as foundational material. A group of three horizontally lying giant stones which form part of the podium of the Roman Jupiter Temple of Baalbek, Lebanon, go by the name 'trilithon.' Each one of these stones is 70 feet long, 14 feet high, 10 feet thick, and weighs around 800 tons. These three stone blocks are the largest building blocks ever used by any human beings anywhere in the world. The supporting stone layer beneath features a number of stones that are still in the order of 350 tons and 35 feet wide. No one knows how these blocks were moved, cut, placed, and fit perfectly together.

Supposedly several years ago Egyptologist Mark Lehner spent five hours in the Aswan quarry with a dolerite hammer stone pounding against the granite bedrock (copper is too soft to cut granite). He was trying to prove that the ancient tools could do the job. He managed to excavate a one-foot square hole one-inch deep for his efforts. And yet, the video that is played in a hall at the Aswan quarry site still portrays that the hewing of the stone for the unfinished and all other obelisks was done this way [...]. The experiments of Dr. Lehner reveal, there is no way that simple stone pounders could possibly have been the main tool to quarry and shape the granite obelisks.