The videos from Lebanon that have circulated these months portray a country collapsing before our eyes. These are the stark images of the explosion that devastated the port of Beirut in August 2020, for example, or the urban violence that accompanies the current economic crisis. Self-taught Lebanese linguist Patrick Khoury, however, recently recorded another type of record. In December, he posted on his YouTube channel a kind of virtual tour of the Roman ruins at Baalbek, in the valley that separates Beirut from Damascus. The video is all in Latin.
The idea is to offer an immersion in what are some of the best preserved Roman ruins in the world. The temples erected at Baalbek some 2,000 years ago, at the beginning of the Christian era, are as impressive as those in Rome. The surroundings – the eye-catching Bekaa valley – enhance the experience. The Brazilian emperor Dom Pedro II, incidentally, passed through there at the end of the 20th century. In his travel diary, he wrote that his entry into the ruins, “by the light of fires and lanterns passing through a long vault of large stones, was triumphant”. The monarch engraved his name on one of the stones of a temple.
In the nearly 20-minute video, Khoury calmly guides visitors through the sprawling Roman-Lebanese complex. The young linguist warns that the Latin he speaks is not exactly the same as the one used in that region. There is no consensus on how Latin sounded so far from Rome, under the influence of languages such as Aramaic, Phoenician and Greek. But Khoury fulfills the proposal to open a window and wave to what life was like there, in the east of the Mediterranean, under the control of the Roman Empire. The video below has subtitles in over ten languages, including Portuguese. Just click on the settings icon.
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