The dusty little bus trundled into the small oasis town of Tadmor, in the middle of the Syrian desert, and I felt I'd come home: it was the eve of the winter solstice and, far from Newgrange, I had come here instead, to make my annual obeisance to the rising sun, writes Mary Russell.
Tadmor predates the Romans - a point which Syrians often like to make, aggrieved that we Europeans rarely stray outside the comfort zone of the classical period. Thus we fail to appreciate that this is a town of immense importance, lying on the crossroads between Roman Syria and Persian Babylon.
Still, if you're a sun worshipper, you have to hand it to the Romans: the Temple to Baal which they built in Tadmor is more than 2,000 years old. But, to prove the Syrians' point, there had been an even earlier temple there dating back a further 2,000 years.
Wherever you want to start counting from, though, this is one of the greatest sites in the ancient world.
Baal, known here as Bel, was the fire god, the Babylonian lord of the planets, the purveyor of wisdom, the almighty deity who guided the world and gave it its fertility. Nowhere was this more evident than in Tadmor, whose underground springs made it a salubrious place to live and where date, olive and pomegranate orchards blossomed, many of these blessings attributed to Bel. In fact, today there are 17 different varieties of dates in Tadmor, all of them sweet, succulent and cherished by local people.
The temple built in Bel's honour is still there, its towering pillars, some 11 metres high, forming a wall which enclosed a space big enough to accommodate a small village.
It has a magnificent ceremonial entrance, although now visitors must use the small door set to one side of it. Nearby is the beginning of an underground tunnel and it was into this that the sacrificial animals were driven - usually camels, rams and bulls, with the horns of the latter beribboned and gilded in preparation for the final ceremony. The tunnel emerges within the main body of the temple, right beside the altar. Adjacent to the altar is the cleansing bath in which the knives and axes were washed and where the priests performed their ablutions before killing the animals. If the entrails were found to be healthy, this was a sign that the sacrifice was acceptable to Bel and they were then carried up the wide steps into the inner sanctum for the last ceremonial offering.
It is the immensity of the temple that is so impressive - but also the knowledge that while anyone can now roam freely in this once sacred place, the ordinary people of Tadmor were never allowed to do so. Their glimpse of the great fire god came only when his statue was taken down from a niche in the inner temple and paraded among them on auspicious days, just as saints' statues are carried in Christian processions.
Last winter solstice, the sun rose behind the gleaming palms trees - the Romans renamed the town Palmyra after them - and blazed down among the Corinthian pillars of the temple whose cornices are decorated intricately with pine cones, acanthus leaves and the desert-dweller's beloved palm fronds, this last a theme found everywhere in Syria.
Within the inner temple, the ceiling of the main altar carries the signs of the zodiac still clearly visible and indicating the movement of the planets. Above the two-tonne lintel is an image of Bel's familiar - an eagle with wings outstretched against a background of a star-studded sky. The huge Hellenistic windows set high up in the walls form a surrealistic image as, framing a rectangle of empty blue sky, a desert dove occasionally flies past in the background. De Chirico could not have staged it better.
With the fall of the Roman Empire, the great temple crumbled and the ordinary people moved in to reclaim their land. Like the Temple of Jupiter in Damascus upon which the stunning Ummayyad Mosque has been built, in Tadmor too the Arabs attempted to impose a mosque on Bel's Temple, but it was a half-hearted mission that finally failed. Instead, the local people moved in, building their flat-roofed houses within the walls of the temple and using every inch of space until, in 1929, the French colonisers chased them out and started to restore the temple, an important and costly exercise which is still going on.
It was strangely peaceful to be in this ancient place, the sun too blinding to gaze on, the scent of wild thyme rising from the ancient stones, the only sounds the clopping of camels' feet plodding along the ceremonial street outside and the soft coo-ing of desert doves inside.
And it was comforting too to realise that this god's influence stretched all the way to megalithic Ireland where, apart from the winter solstice, his other month of celebration is Bealtaine, a composite word incorporating Baal and tine, our word for fire. Some gods are always with us.