Kilroy was There: 33 Centuries of Leaving Your Mark at the Nahr al-Kalb

The pillars which Sesostris of Egypt set up in the various countries are for the most part no longer to be seen extant; but in Syria Palestine I myself saw them existing with the inscription upon them which I have mentioned and the emblem.

      Herodotus, The Histories, Book II, 106

There's a place in Lebanon where conquerors have been making their mark — literally — for 33 centuries. There is an inscription of Ramses II from year four of his reign (1275 BC, more or less) and one marking the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon in 2000 AD.  Sesostris, mentioned by Herodotus, is partly mythical and partly a conflation of real Pharaohs, but the monument Herodotus tells us he saw with his own eyes was probably one of the monuments left by Ramses II at the Nahr al-Kalb. The Nahr al-Kalb ("Dog River" in Arabic) is the River Lycus of the Classical geographers, and runs into the Mediterranean a few miles north of Beirut. There is an Ottoman bridge and traces of Roman ones; a bluff rises sharply above the ancient road, so travelers had to pass through a narrow passage between the sea and the cliff. A marching army passing by the cliffside would want to record its passage. So would their kings and generals.

Ramses II and Esarhaddon

In between Ramses and the Israelis there are more monuments of Ramses II, one from Esarhaddon (his text here) and some from other Assyrian Kings, the Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar, a Seleucid (Antiochus the Great), the Roman Emperor Caracalla, the Mamluk Sultan Barquq, Napoleon III, and, just in the past century, British and French inscriptions from the collapse of the Ottomans in 1918, a 1920 inscription by Gen. Gouraud celebrating the French defeat of Faisal's Syrian forces at Maysalun, other inscriptions from the Mandate era, a Free French inscription from driving out Vichy in 1941, Lebanese independence and the withdrawal of French forces in 1946, and the aforementioned Israeli withdrawal of 2000.

Either the Crusaders somehow missed it, or theirs has weathered away. You can find a list of the monuments here.

Allied Armies 1918

I don't doubt the common soldiers wrote the usual things, the Bronze Age version of "Kilroy was here," or obscenities or dirty pictures or whatever; later passers-by, weather and the centuries doubtless erased these. But once Ramses II started the fashion of carving his victories there, later conquerors had to do the same, and these were carved in stone. Esarhaddon specifically brags about how he conquered Egypt, and put his monument next to Ramses, posthumously rubbing it in, I guess.

Israeli withdrawal

And so it continued, and continues into our own day. It is a testimonial I suppose to geography in two ways: geography determined the site, where the road passed between a cliff and the sea and crossed a river, but Lebanon's geography as the center point in the Fertile Crescent (the river was once the boundary between the Egyptian and Hittite Empires) meant that marching armies going to conquer one of its bigger neighbors nearby were likely to pass along this road. It is a great lesson in geographical determinism in history, and a reminder of how often war has come to this region.

I saw the Nahr al-Kalb only once, some 40 years ago. It's seen more wars and acquired at least one monument since then. But I don't know why it hasn't occurred to me to blog about it before.

UPDATE: On Herodotus' use of "Palestine," see the comments below.