Megalithic Marvels - Baalbek: the 1,000+ Ton Ancient Blocks Nobody Can Explain | Hugh Newman

Episode Date: September 9, 2026

At Baalbek in modern-day Lebanon lie some of the most colossal stone blocks ever quarried in the ancient world—some estimated to weigh well over 1,000 tons. In this episode, we investigate the mysteries surrounding these enormous megaliths, how ancient builders cut and attempted to move stones of such incredible size, and the theories surrounding the engineering knowledge behind them. Were they simply an extraordinary achievement of ancient construction, or could Baalbek preserve evidence of lost technology from the distant past?JOIN ME ON A TOUR

Well, I'm excited to be joined by author, explore, researcher, Hugh Newman, Hugh. Thanks for joining me again on Megalithic Marvels. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me back. Your article on Balbeck, the Temple of the Giants, or you might pronounce it Balbeck, can you give us just a snapshot of this story, this site, and how this new block that was found that so massive is related possibly to giants? yeah for sure yeah so balbek this is one of the most important sites on the planet in my opinion it's in the becker valley of lebanon it's one of many sites in the area actually but this is by far the most impressive but it's not

just the site itself it's the quarry which is about just over half a mile or so away slightly downhill from the site if you go to the site itself you see these giant blocks 800 tons some of them many of them four to 500 tons some 600 tonners there these are the size of a house these are outrageous you know and these were bought from this quarry uphill over half a mile and raised 30 or 40 feet in the air some of them and yet you know people say oh yeah don't worry the romans did it and so on and so forth but there's no actual pure evidence of that unfortunately And then if you'd look into the historical reality of Balbek, it was built upon this occupational mound or a tell. And this goes back to the Mesolithic.

This goes, so nearly the time talking about of Kerohan Tepe and Quebecli Tepe, but in Lebanon. And there's Phoenician ruins there. And then it was built on by the Romans and other cultures. Medieval, there's even medieval parts added to it and Muslims, another such thing. There's a story of this giant skull that was found under one of the stones there and it was housed in a mosque. Jim Vieira's got the info on that. There's no official kind of report of that. It's just mentioned in some old texts.

There's the stories of the fact that it was built by giants before the flood. It's linked with the whole Adam, Noah and that lineage and everything else. But you go to the quarry and there's a couple of stones there which are amazing. you've got the stone of the pregnant woman strangely this weighs almost exactly 1,000 tons there's another stone just a slightly separate quarry on the opposite side of the road that's 1,242 tons i believe um and then there's you go back to the stone of the pregnant woman that quarry there underneath it they found another stone in 2014 which weighs 1,640 or 1,650 or 1,650. 50 tons.

And this is just outrageous. But then, you know, people are questioned, oh, well, that's great. They carved it out. But they haven't moved it yet. And then, but you actually go to the site over half a mile uphill or away. You can see the gaps in the temple where these stones were going to go. You know, clearly, you know, there's gaps there that they haven't quite finished it. So something stopped them doing it.

Clearly, if they can move 800 ton stones, effortlessly, it seems, place them high. up in walls. They might have been able to move these, but they got interrupted or something. Who knows what happened? But, you know, we have to question what an earth is going on here. How could they do it? There's all these different theories. But to me, there's a connection with the giants

makes sense. I think there's a connection with magic and telekinetic abilities as well. I think that's often overlooked. And I think a combination of these might have been how they did it. Right. And you mentioned the Romans, they get credit for the site in building these blocks.

Again, if you see the photos of this site, it's absolutely mind-blowing 1,600-ton blocks, you know, really precision cut in a sense. Yet we don't see anything like that as big in Rome anywhere, right? Down, you know, where the center of Roman power was, we don't see blocks this big, but we find them way out here in Lebanon, and the Romans get to credit, right?

They get a lot of credit, but they could move, like, two or three hundred tons. We know that. We know they could do it. We know they moved obelisks from Egypt, which are what,

somewhere 240 tons, something like this. They attempted to move other stones that then broke and they didn't complete the project. So we know they were capable of very large stones, but this is a different thing. You know, you look at how deep is buried in the ground,

this quarry you know they're to dig deep to find these stones this isn't just from a couple of thousand years ago this is a much older level we're talking about here um i think that that that is often not addressed it's not looked at properly um we know an archaeologist out there he's still convinced it's all roman the archaeologists we hang out with when we go there and you can't change his mind for anything you just can't do it even though there's they found mesolithic flints and things like this at the site of belbeck itself um and Neolithic finds and everything else. But yeah, it's one of the big,

it's one of the big megalithic mysteries of the planet Balbek. And I think it's well worth, what you see it with your eyes? That's when it kind of hits you. It's like, oh, okay, this is real. They actually did this. But it's like when you go to Egypt, you look at some stones of almost comparable size in Egypt.

With the unfinished obelisk, still in the quarry as one. which is 1,168 tonnes. We have, that never got moved, obviously, but that's made of granite, so they were carving much harder stone. We have some of the platforms on the middle pyramid,

Cathrae's Pyramid, which were moved and placed. Some of these are hundreds of tons. We have other, you know, elements, like in the Valley Temple there as well. Some of the blocks in Peru, Sauczei, Wuma, what, 200 tons? The Assyrian.

So it was, happening back then. But I think with Balbeck, it was a different, it was just a different level. It just, and I personally think Balbeck and Egypt are much more strongly connected than people realize. And if you start looking, if you start going back as well, you find that Quebec Le Teppi and Balbeck are connected, geodetically between each other, as though they were, sites were chosen, knowing the position of the other sites across the landscape. It's something that Howard Crowhurst and I and others have been looking at as well. And so, yeah, there's a lot more to this that meets the eye.

And how we can move these today is, again, another mystery. Last question about this, and that is, what's the significance of the word Balbeck? And is it connected to the original foundation stones, possibly of the temple in Jerusalem? Yeah, there's a possibility with that, because you, what is it? You have a stone, which is, what, 560 tons? that's found supposedly at the base of what I believe was Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, near the wailing wall, which has got very big stones in it as well. The whole bar name is up for debate.

There's a big story about that. It's like this pagan god that goes back to the time of the Canaanites, which has got some dark connotation. They were known to be cannibals. There was sacrifice, children and other things. such things and there's all these kind of modern occult traditions that still worship barl and so forth i don't want to get into that too much i guess and um but there's yeah so i think there's a connection between all these these biblical sites of gods but now with

gebeckley tep is in the mix as well but i think it's from an earlier phase there's something profound going on there and clearly quarrying the stone carving technologies reached a point at Balbeck where they sussed out how to do it supersized. And that may have only been a few generations of people who had that understanding. And then it was lost. Maybe some of it reached Egypt, eventually Peru and so forth. Well, Hugh, this has been a great interview. Thank you so much for your time.

How can people follow you, connect with you, and get involved with your latest projects? Yes, sure. I mean, we, they can go to megalithomania.com. UK. They can search for Hugh Newman and my partner, JJ Ainsworth. If they want to connect up with us, they should come to our conference. We do that every May, early May in Glastonbury. We have some top speakers coming every year.

We've got a whole bunch of them, Robin Heath, Irving Finkel, a whole bunch of people coming. We have some top archaeologists joining us as well. And we also do a few days of talk. around the conference. And it's also online as well. We're doing it. We're going to send you a link for that as well, an online version so people can watch it from home because this, we kind of created it to create this bridge between academia and the alternative world because we felt it was not being addressed. There's all this, you know, look at what's happening with Graham Hancock and ancient apocalypse. There's all this kind of back and forth, negative energy being

thrown around. And yeah, and we're going to, we're working hard on a couple of publications, which hopefully be out. One of them will be out later this year and another one the next year. Awesome. And everybody listening or watching, make sure and subscribe to the Megalithomania YouTube channel. Great videos. He's always pumping out content. So he thinks again, man, and safe journeys out there in the world. Yeah, well, thanks for having me on. Dee. I appreciate it. And I look forward to catching up again soon.