Other aspects of Ellul’s theory are less far-fetched and he has some well-reasoned arguments about flood damage at Hagar Qim – but this was not what I had come to talk to him about that day in June 2000 on the second of my three big research visits to Malta. Having failed to make contact with him in November 1999, I was here now exclusively to find out if he could shed any fresh light on the mystery of Zeitlmair’s missing underwater temple. It immediately became obvious, however, that Ellul did not regard the temple as in any way being ‘Zeitlmair’s’, or missing, and that he clearly felt aggrieved about how his own role in the discovery had been interpreted.
Muttering in Maltese, he shuffled to a wardrobe positioned in the hall outside his kitchen and took down from it a rolled photographic print. It proved to be another, larger version of the aerial view of the Sliema coast that Zeitlmair had shown me the previous November. At the foot of it Ellul had drawn in a scale by hand and had typed the following legend: ‘Undersea Prehistoric ruins situated at Direction Bearing 65 degrees NE of St George’s Tower, 2.5 kilometres from land at a depth of 25 feet’.11
I was puzzled by one of the figures and asked: ‘You got the depth from Zeitlmair, I suppose, after the Arrigos dived on the temple in 1999?’
Ellul favoured me with a sinister smile. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I got the depth from another Maltese diver, Commander Scicluna, in 1994.’
He shuffled off and returned with a much marked and tagged copy of his book in which he had been incorporating corrections for a new edition. He opened the book and from a small stack of papers folded inside the front cover pulled out a press clipping. The clipping, from the letters page of the Sunday Times of Malta, was dated 20 February 1994 and was a response to an article on the subject of sea-level rise that had appeared in the paper on 13 February 1994:
SEA-LEVEL CHANGES
From Comm. S. A. Scicluna
THE ARTICLE ‘Sea-level changes of the past and present’ by Peter Gatt (the Sunday Times, February 13) indicates that Malta’s shores are going down at the rate of 2 mm a year … This is taking place in many Mediterranean countries, especially in Sicily, which is very close to us. At Marsameni and Motya, the evidence is very clear because both of them are now underwater.
In Malta this evidence is also clear. There are three sites which are now completely under water: the oil wells at Saint George’s Bay in Birzebuga (mentioned by P. P. Castagna in Malta u il-Gzejjer Tagha), a rock-cut tomb in Sliema (exactly like the ones in Bingemma) – this is now in 25 feet of water; and a prehistoric temple I located last summer under 25 feet of water, also at Sliema.
I myself reported this find to President Tabone, to Dr Michael Frendo, Minister of Youth and Arts, and to Dr Tancred Gouder, Director of Museums.
S. A. Scicluna,
Sliema
Commander Scicluna, eh? Another name for my list. Plus of course President Tabone, Dr Michael Frendo and Tancred Gouder. It would be interesting to learn if any of these three, presuming they were still with us, had done anything at all to follow up Scicluna’s claim to have found a temple underwater off Sliema.
Because unlike Zeitlmair, whose zany associations with ancient astronauts must not be held against him – but who unfortunately could not dive – it transpired that Scicluna was an archaeological diver of some renown who had led several underwater expeditions and received commendations from the British Navy and from the British Committee of Nautical Archaeology.12 When such a suitably qualified and experienced man chooses to state in a national newspaper that he has found a prehistoric temple underwater, it is appropriate that he be taken seriously.
But had he been? After parting company with Ellul and returning to the flat that Santha and I had rented that June, I tried directory inquiries for Commander Scicluna’s number. They couldn’t help me. Then I called Manjri Bindra, a friend of ours in Malta who is very good at finding people, and within an hour she had the number for me.
I dialled and waited. There was a long delay, then a woman’s voice answered the phone: ‘Hello.’
‘Oh. Yes. Hello. Er … My name is Graham Hancock. Is this Commander Scicluna’s residence?’ Another delay, then: ‘Yes.’
‘Oh, good. Look, I’m sorry to disturb you, but please may I speak to him?’ Silence.
‘I’m an author,’ I gabbled, ‘I’m researching a book about underwater ruins, and I understand that Commander Scicluna is a great expert in this field. I would like to speak to him about a temple, underwater, that he discovered off Sliema …’
‘I’m afraid that will be impossible.’
I was nonplussed: ‘Why?’ I protested. ‘I just need to speak with him for a few moments, to confirm something.’
‘I regret that my husband passed away four days ago’, the lady replied.
Now, all at once, I understood the sadness and fatigue in her voice and stammered my apologies for disturbing her.
‘It is all right’, she said wearily.
Hubertworld … (2)
Malta, 9 November 1999
Santha and I sat in the coffee lounge of the Diplomat Hotel in Sliema drinking cappuccinos with Hubert Zeitlmair. We had been there since 8 a.m.; it was now 9 and there was still no sign of the Arrigo brothers showing up in their truck to take us diving. This was annoying, as we were already partly dressed for the water, had our mesh bags packed at our feet, and could observe that the sea in which we had been expecting even now to be preparing to dive, was calm, windless and generally perfect for our enterprise.
‘I don’t understand it,’ Zeitlmair was saying. ‘We had a firm agreement that they would pick us up this morning at eight. Everything was arranged. I spoke with them myself just yesterday.’
We had already tried to phone the Arrigos’ dive shop, and their mobiles, but without success. Admittedly it was still early, but it was odd that they were so uncontactable – and so not here. Was Malta going to be a bust? I was beginning to think so. Because, after all, even if an underwater temple did exist at Sliema, why should the Arrigos take me to it? In the event that it was archaeologically important, then it was sooner or later going to become a hot media property; meanwhile, the Arrigos’ interests, and the interests of the site, might be best served by keeping its location confidential.
It was obvious even then that the matter of ‘proprietorship’ was far from settled. Zeitlmair had a strong claim, to be sure, but it was by no means free of encumbrances – and who was to say that he would ever be able to relocate his ‘temple’ should the Arrigos decide not to cooperate? Even in the best circumstances objects found underwater are easily lost again unless accurate shore-bearings have been taken from the boat – impossible for the blind – or a GPS has been used to record the precise latitude and longitude of the entry point.
‘Do you have GPS numbers for the site?’ I now asked Zeitlmair.
‘No,’ he confessed, ‘but I told you already it is very simple to find it. We just go out 2.5 or 3 kilometres from Saint George’s Tower and use the echo sounder …’
‘Until we come to a reef that is shallower than the surrounding water?’ ‘Exactly. Then we will be on the spot.’
Around 11 a.m. we finally managed to get a call through to Shaun Arrigo’s mobile phone.
It transpired that the two brothers and their father – who ran the diving business together – were on a boat off Gozo and would not be back in Malta until the evening of the following day. Although they knew of me and my visit, they claimed that no arrangement whatsoever had been made by Zeitlmair for them to guide me to the underwater temple that morning, and that they wanted to meet me first in order to discuss the matter further before deciding whether they wished to guide me at all. Besides, it was the law of the land that I should be certified medically fit by a Maltese doctor before I would be allowed to dive in Maltese waters. Had I yet obtained such a certificate? No? Then that too needed to be arranged. They proposed that I call round to their dive shop in two days time, on 11 November, to see if we could ‘work things o
ut’.
Silently fuming at myself for not having dealt directly with the Arrigos from the beginning in a matter as important as this, I turned to Zeitlmair: ‘Are you sure you can find the site again?’
‘Sure!’ he barked.
He did sound sure.
‘OK, then, Hubert, here’s what I suggest we do …’
Bird’s-eye view … (3)
Malta, 24 June 2001
We’ve left Sliema behind and now the helicopter is rushing rapidly west along the north coast of Malta. Dropping our altitude to 100 metres, we soar over White Rocks and head for Qawra Point – a finger-shaped promontory dividing Salina Bay from Saint Paul’s Bay.
There we circle and hover above the spot in the sea where two days before Chris Agius, a new friend who has come to our aid in Malta within the past month, led us on a dive to a remarkable straight canal cut out of the solid limestone of the sea-bed at a depth of 25 metres. A low bridge, also hewn out of the bedrock, spans the canal at one point, and Chris has identified tool marks on its inner walls …13
We fly on, crossing Saint Paul’s Bay and Mellieha Bay, crossing the Gozo Channel from Cirkewwa with the tiny midway island of Comino to our right. And I remember that here, too, somewhere in the channel between Malta and Comino, a prehistoric stone circle is rumoured to exist. In fact it is rather more than a rumour, since I have talked directly with one of the commercial divers who saw the structure before – as he claims – it was buried by developers beneath concrete pilings …
It would not be the first time in Malta that an archaeological discovery has been conveniently hushed up to allow a construction project to go ahead. The same thing happened at the Hypogeum of Hal Saflieni, which was entered and looted by labourers renovating houses above it at the end of the nineteenth century at least three years before archaeologists ever learned of its existence. The initial discovery was very deliberately not reported to the authorities for fear that they would sequester the site.14
Hubertworld … (3)
Malta, 9–10 November 1999
After the failure of communication over our dive plans with the Arrigos for the 9th I felt superstitious. I therefore made the decision to hire a boat and dive support from another dive shop and mount an entirely new search for the underwater temple without the Arrigos’ help. Zeitlmair agreed and issued several more cheering statements to the effect that he would lead us straight to the spot, having got the Arrigos there before without any difficulty, etc….
In character with the general pattern of annoyance and frustration that seemed to have draped itself around me that November, I then took our business to a dive-shop staffed by pessimists and safety fanatics who began issuing dire warnings about the weather, and various dangers associated with diving in Malta in the winter months, virtually from the moment that I walked in their door.
It took all of the rest of the 9th to sort out the medical certificates, find and hire the right type of boat, and tie up the arrangements for dive assistance the next day.
But the 10th dawned grey, stormy and windblown, with white-caps breaking out in the open sea in front of Sliema. Santha and I looked gloomily at the waves from our balcony in the Diplomat Hotel and decided that we would chance it. We had dived in worse. And the boat that we had hired was a 50 foot motorized lutzu (traditional Maltese fishing vessel) that should, in theory, be able to handle these conditions without too much difficulty. We might take a bit of a pounding getting back on board after each dive, but that was acceptable. While we were submerged we should face no problems.
Our new dive suppliers did not agree. What if there was a current and we were to get swept away from the boat? It was sturdy but not very fast and in high seas it might lose us completely. Sliema was not some enclosed bay, after all. The next landfall was Sicily, 90 kilometres to the north.
More badgering followed along these lines and I was eventually obliged to concede that diving was probably not a very good idea that day …
Bird’s-eye view … (4)
Malta, 24 June 2001
Our hour in the helicopter is rapidly ticking by. We’ve passed Comino and hover over Gozo’s Mgarr Harbour before heading into the heart of the island. There, south of Xaghra – itself the site of a huge semi-subterranean stone circle – is the necromancer’s castle, the ‘Giant’s Tower’ of Gigantija, the greatest and the oldest of the megalithic temples of the Maltese archipelago, reckoned to have been built around 3600 BC.
Looking down on it from above, I am struck not only by its enormous size but also by the way in which it faithfully and exactly reproduces what may be thought of as the ‘canon’ of all the Maltese megalithic temples – an outer retaining wall of cyclopean blocks, some up to 5 metres high and many in the range of 15 tonnes or more, set out in a series of expansive, graceful curves to enclose an irregular space that feels more organic than architectural. This inner space contains a series of altars, shrines and large apsidal rooms interconnected by axial passageways, all of which are also lined with huge megaliths of mixed coralline and globigerina limestone.
Floorplan of Gigantija temple. Based on Evans (1971).
Unlike other simpler temples, Gigantija features two distinct and not quite parallel axial passages oriented east of south which dominate the whole complex. By means of imposing stone gateways, each of these passages penetrates a concave megalithic façade defining the only two ‘entrances’ to the structure. The easternmost axis leads to four large apsidal rooms arranged in two pairs of opposed lobes. The westernmost axis leads to five apses – two arranged as an opposing pair and the remaining three in the form of a clover-leaf.
Orthodox scholarly opinion holds that the islands of the Maltese archipelago remained entirely uninhabited until 5200 BC - 7200 years ago – when they were settled by Neolithic agriculturalists from nearby Sicily.15
Orthodox scholarly opinion dates Gigantija to 3600 BC - 5600 years ago.
The time lapse between settlement 7200 years ago and the construction of Gigantija 5600 years ago is 1600 years. And while there is evidence of small-scale construction and the hewing out of rock tombs in the Maltese islands during this period, there is nothing from the excavation record that archaeologists are able to show us which in any way seriously charts the evolution of the temple-building phase. On the contrary:
The temple builders did not begin with small-scale structures. Gigantija … is a tremendous work of architectural design and of engineering, built a thousand years before the date usually given for the Great Pyramid.16
To this Colin Renfrew, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, adds:
The façade [of Gigantija], perhaps the earliest architecturally conceived exterior in the world, is memorably imposing. Large slabs of coralline limestone, set alternatively end-on and sideways on, rise to a height of eight metres; these slabs are up to four metres high for the first course, and above this six courses of megalithic blocks still survive. A small temple model of the period suggests that originally the façade may have been as high as 16 metres.17
Cyclopean walls 16 metres high? At first sight, admits Renfrew,
it seems inconceivable that such monuments could be built without the organization and the advanced technology of a truly urban civilization … Yet according to the radiocarbon chronology, the temples are the earliest free-standing monuments of stone in the world. In the Near East at about this time, 3000 BC and perhaps even earlier, the mud-brick temples of the ‘proto-literate period’ of Sumerian civilization were evolving: impressive monuments in themselves but something very different from the Maltese structures.18
How are we to explain the fact that the oldest free-standing stone monuments in the world, which by virtue of their size and sophistication unambiguously declare themselves to have been built by a people who had already accumulated long experience in the science of megalithic construction, appear on the archaeological scene on a group of very small islands – the Maltese archipelago – that had not even been in
habited by human beings until 1600 years previously? Isn’t this counter-intuitive? Wouldn’t one expect a ‘civilization history’ to show up in the Maltese archaeological record documenting ever-more sophisticated construction techniques – and indeed wouldn’t one also expect an extensive ‘civilization territory’ capable of supporting a reasonably sized population (rather than tiny barren islands) to surround and nourish the greatest architectural leap forward of antiquity?
Dr Anton Mifsud, President of the Prehistoric Society of Malta, who we will be hearing from a great deal in the coming chapters, offers this succinct summary of the problem: ‘Malta is presently too small in size to have sustained the earliest architectural civilization; its civilization territory is missing.’19
We circle over Gigantija one more time, then bank sharply to the south-east, cross the Gozo Channel again and hover over a rugged spot called Marfa Point at the extremity of the main island of Malta.
Here, underwater, two days previously, we saw further strange channels cut in the rock, some running in distinctive parallel tracks, leading to the edge of a drop-off at 8 metres. Beneath the drop-off we were shown a terrace of three large right-angled steps cut into the interior of a cave at 25 metres.
Could the ‘civilization territory’ of Malta be missing because it is now underwater?
Hubertworld … (4)
Malta, 11–13 November 1999
I didn’t keep the loose appointment that I had made to try to ‘work things out’ with the Arrigos on 11 November, but I also did not go diving that day; 2 metre waves whipped up by the strong prevailing wind from the north-east still prohibited that.