Of this troublous history the rocks of Syria themselves give evidence. At the mouth of the Dog River, near Beirut, where Rameses II. had erected three bas-reliefs in honour of Ptah, Ra, and Ammon, Tiglath Pileser I.--the hunter already noticed who also conquered the Hittites--left his statue about 1100 B.C., and another Assyrian tablet on this spot is thought to be even older. Four more tablets were added later, between 885 and 681 B.C., by Assur Nazir Pal, by Shalmanezer III., by Sennacherib, and by Esarhaddon, showing that all these conquerors passed by Beirut. Near this group of tablets mutilated inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar have also been found, and quite recently, in 1884, other inscriptions by Nebuchadnezzar have been recovered on the eastern slope of the Lebanon not far from Kadesh.
The Medes swept away the Babylonians, the Persians succeeded the Medes, and the Syrians continued to preserve their own civilisation, as witnessed by the art of Phœnicia, which throve especially in the Persian period. The battle of Issus raised a new power in Asia, and with the successors of Alexander a new capital arose in the valley of the Orontes at Antioch. It is remarkable, considering the power and wealth of these Greek monarchs, that they should have left us no monuments in Syria, as far as is at present known. Their coins are frequently found, and are often of great beauty, being among the earliest on which the head of a king appears portrayed from life. During this age, even as late as 307 B.C., the Greek kings of Cyprus were still using the peculiar script called the Cypriote syllabary, but no trace of its use has yet been discovered in Syria, where the simpler Phœnician alphabet reigned supreme, while on the Greek coins of the Seleucids the kindred Greek characters appear.
Nor are the troublous times of the great struggle which gave Syria to the Romans represented by monuments; but with the Antonines a great architectural period began, when Baalbek was built, as well as many great cities throughout Syria. It has often been supposed that the enormous stones which form part of the outer wall at Baalbek are remains of a Phœnician temple preceding the Roman fane, but the visitor can satisfy himself that these huge blocks--more than sixty feet in length, and unrivalled elsewhere in Syria--stand on Roman masonry; and we have nothing to lead us to suppose that the Phœnicians ever used such enormous masonry. The Baalbek Temple is indeed one of the most certainly-dated buildings in Syria, and the Latin inscription on the east wall, copied by Ward and Dawkins, but now almost illegible, gives the names of Antoninus Pius and Julia Domna, who appear to have founded the huge sanctuary in honour of the “great gods of Heliopolis.”