Looking For the Forests of Lebanon
About 4,500 years ago, we are told by archaeologists, a Semitic tribe swept in out of
the desert and occupied the eastern shore of the Mediterranean and established the harbor
towns of Tyre and Sidon. On the site of another such ancient harbor town is Beirut, which
today is the capital of Lebanon. You can see it from a high point on the Lebanon Mountains
overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. These early Semites were Phoenicians. They found
their land a mountainous country with a very narrow coastal plain and a little flat land
to carry out the traditional irrigated agriculture as it had grown up in Mesopotamia and
Egypt. We may believe that as the Phoenician people increased, they were confronted three
choices: (1) Migration and colonization, which we know they did; (2) manufacturing and
commerce which we know they did; and (3) cultivation of slopes, about which we have
hitherto heard-little.
Here was a land covered with forests and watered by the rains of heaven, a land that
held entirely new problems for fillers of soil who were accustomed to the flat alluvial
valleys of Mesopotamia and the Nile. As forests were cleared either for domestic use or
for commerce, slopes were cultivated. Soils of the slopes eroded then under heavy winter
rains as they would now. Here under rain farming, they encountered severe soil erosion and
the problem of establishing a permanent agriculture on sloping lands.
We find, as we read the record on the land in this fascinating region, tragedy after
tragedy deeply engraved on the sloping land. To control erosion walls were constructed
across the slopes. Ruins of these walls can be seen here and there today. These measures
failed, and erosion caused the soil to shift down slope, As the fine-textured soil was
washed away, leaving loose rocks at the surface, tillers of the soil piled the rocks
together to make cultivation about them easier. In these cases the battle with soil
erosion was definitely a losing one.
Elsewhere we found that the battle with soil erosion had been won by the construction
and maintenance of a remarkable series of rock-walled terraces extending from the bases to
the crests of slopes like fantastic staircases (fig. 5). At Beit Eddine in the mountains
of Lebanon east of Beirut, we found the slopes terraced even up to grades of 76 percent.
FIGURE 5. Rock-walled bench terraces in Lebanon
that have been in use for thousands of years. The construction of terraces of this type
would cost from $2,000 to $5,000 per acre if labor was figured at 40 cents per hour. Such
expensive methods of protecting land are practical only where people have no other land on
which to raise their food.
The mountains of ancient Phoenicia were once covered by the famous forests, the cedars
of Lebanon. An inscription on the temple of Karnak, as translated by Breasted, announces
the arrival in Egypt before 2900 B.C. of 40 ships ladden with timber out of Lebanon.
You will recall that it was King Solomon, nearly 3,000 years ago, who made an agreement
with Hiram, King of Tyre, to furnish him cypress and cedars out of these forests for the
construction of the temple at Jerusalem. Solomon supplied 80,000 lumberjacks to work in
the forest and 70,000 to skid the logs to the sea. It must have been a heavy forest to
require such a force. What has become of this famous forest that once covered nearly 2,000
square miles?
Today, only 4 small groves of this famous Lebanon cedar forest are left, the most
important of which is the Tripoli grove of trees in the cup of a valley. An examination of
the grove revealed some 400 trees of which 4-3 are old veterans or wolf trees. As we read
the story written in tree rings, it appears that about 300 years ago the grove had nearly
disappeared with no less than 43 scattered veteran trees standing.
These trees with wide-spreading branches had grown up in an open stand. About that time
a little church was built in their midst that made the grove sacred. A stone wall was
built about the grove to keep out the goats that grazed over the mountains. Seeds from the
veteran trees fell to the ground, germinated, and grew up into a fine close-growing stand
of tall straight trees that show how the cedars of Lebanon will make good construction
timber when grown in forest conditions (fig. 6).
FIGURE 6. Cedars still grow in Lebanon when given
a chance. This is part of one of the four small groves that still exist. It is in the
grounds of a monastery and is protected from goat grazing by the stone fence.
Such natural restocking also shows that this famous forest has not disappeared because
of adverse change of climate, but that under the present climate it would extend itself if
it were safe-guarded against the rapacious goats that graze down every accessible living
plant on these mountains.
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