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 little flat land on,which 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 with 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 tillers 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 cast 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 43 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 widespreading 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 one 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 safeguarded against the rapacious goats that graze down every accessible living plant on these mountains.