Over the Ages, Lebanon’s Conquerors Left Their Marks at Dog River

NAHR EL KELB, Lebanon —  For more than 30 centuries, foreign armies tramping across Lebanon left monuments to their passage on a rocky outcrop north of Beirut.

The 17 memorials at Nahr el Kelb (Dog River) form an open-air museum of the history of the troubled country. But some modern incursions have so far gone unrecorded.

“The Palestinians, the Syrians, the Israelis and the Iranians are missing. We Lebanese should mark their departure when they leave,” said historian Hariss Boustany.

The tradition began, it is thought, with Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses II who arrived in the 13th Century BC to dispute possession of the area with the Hittites from the north.

Each Invader Left Monument

“The rock was difficult to cross and was such a major challenge to all invaders that each time they passed they left a monument,” said Boustany.

In those days, the rock extended to the coast. Armies were forced to climb over it to pass between the coastal city states to the north and south.

Today’s coast road runs through twin tunnels in the rock and crosses the river on a modern bridge which has replaced at least three older ones a little farther upstream.

The fertile estuary alongside is farmland and the river, no more than a stream in summer, trickles out of a deep, rocky gorge.

Worn by Wind and Rain

The Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Phoenicians and the Romans all left inscriptions, although erosion by wind and rain makes many of them difficult to read.

Mythology says the rock that gives the river its name once bore a huge statue of a wolf or dog.

“Probably it was a natural formation that looked like an animal,” said Boustany, former director of Beirut Museum.

A book, “Beirut Through the Ages” by Nina Jidejian, records: “Upon the arrival of a hostile army, it was said, the dog howled so loud that his bark was heard as far away as the island of Cyprus.

‘Dog Was Overturned’

“Once the Ottomans controlled the area, the dog was overturned and cast into the sea. . . . “

Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius was so proud of the road he carved around the outcrop at the coast in around 215 that he left a tablet behind.

Before him in the 3rd Century BC, Alexander the Great seems to have been in too much of a hurry to leave a monument. “He was too busy conquering the world,” said Boustany.

The Crusaders, the European Christian fighters dating from the 11th Century, and the Ottoman Turks, who ruled from 1517 to 1918, are also absent.

The tradition appears to have been revived in modern times when Napoleon III sent troops under Gen. Beaufort d’Hautepoul to end a series of massacres of Christians and Druze by Muslims in 1860.

Their inscription sits in a dip because the road level has been raised.

Reason for Muslim Revolt

The Muslim revolt arose because the French and British, bickering over control of the area, had persuaded the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople to declare equality for all his citizens regardless of religion.

It led to a 1864 protocol among the great powers of the time declaring Lebanon to be a neutral and autonomous province under the sultan, sparking a period of prosperity which lasted until World War I.

Although nominally independent since 1920, Lebanon was a French protectorate until 1941, when, with France under Nazi occupation, a force of British and the Free French arrived.

Their tablet, which says they “captured Damascus, bringing freedom to Syria and the Lebanon,” is the last foreign one except for a plaque erected by Australian engineers who built a railway on the route of the Roman road around the rock in 1942.

Lebanese Have Last Word

The Lebanese themselves had the last word with a text in Arabic marking the departure in 1946 of the last French troops.

“When our neighbors fought among themselves, Lebanon was safe, but when they did not, they fought over Lebanon, bringing their wars here,” Boustany said.

Modern parallels are inescapable.

The start of Lebanon’s civil war in 1975 is blamed by many on the growth of a state-within-a-state created by Palestinians who had fled newly created Israel in the 1940s.

Israel has since invaded and still occupies part of the south and Syrian troops control two-thirds of the country. Iran has several hundred Revolutionary Guards based in Lebanon, and Palestinian fighters still attract repeated Israeli attacks.

When might the Lebanese be able to erect memorials at Dog River to record their departure? “In the near future, I hope,” Boustany said.