Besides, we had been down for quite a while now, quite deep – 38 metres at the outset, then a long hard swim for twenty minutes or so at between 30 and 22 metres. I checked my air pressure gauge and found, as I had expected after burning so much energy, that I was already below 100 bar on what was only a moderate-sized 12 litre tank. Another 50 bar – definitely less than twenty minutes at this rate unless we got into shallower water – and I was going to have to ascend, allowing enough air for at least a five-minute rest-stop (and preferably a bit more) at 5 metres. Arrigo seemed to be making a personal statement of some sort by staying ahead of me in the water at all times so I couldn’t see his guage. But I could be reasonably sure that his air consumption would be better than mine, since he was twenty years my junior and dived for a living.
We swam on for a while at 22 metres, still against the current, then I caught up with Arrigo with another titanic effort, grabbed one of his fins to get his attention, showed him my guage – now down to 70 bar – and signed that I was going to start doing this dive in shallower water.
He indicated that he preferred to stay deep for a bit longer – making the ‘search’ signal as he did so.
Hmm … Interesting …
Very slowly, remaining parallel with Arrigo but now above him, I began to ascend.
I realized that I was exhausted, almost gasping for breath as though the wind had been knocked out of me, but my ego would not allow me to show it or make any sign of distress. So I tried to relax, calm my breathing, reduce my heart-rate. Like other bad, fruitless dives that I had done, I told myself, I was going to get through this one.
I did the rest-stop and had 50 bar left when I reached the surface – all fine and orderly. No panic. The only problem, as I looked around from the peaks and valleys of the billowing waves upon which I now bobbed like a cork with my BCD fully inflated, was that there seemed to be no sign at all of the lutzu.
I couldn’t see it anywhere. It had gone.
Moments later, blowing like a seal, Arrigo joined me from the depths with 70 bar on his gauge. So at least I would have someone to talk to while I waited to drown or die of exposure.
Bird’s-eye view … (7)
Malta, 24 June 2001
We’re still hovering over Clapham Junction while Colin Clark, the Channel 4 cameraman, and Santha with her Nikons continue to occupy the open door and window, trying to get clean shots of the cart-ruts to compare with what we have seen underwater at Marfa Point.
The complicated question of which parts of the island are rising and which are sinking because of activity along the Pantalleria Rift must, of course, be factored into the equation along with sea-level changes – but theoretically it ought to be possible to calculate a fairly accurate date for the submergence of the Marfa Point ‘ruts’. That would then give us a terminus ante quern for the cutting of the ruts by human beings – i.e., we could be sure that the ruts had been cut before the date of their submergence and must therefore be at least that old.
Interestingly, Anton Mifsud’s tireless research in the archives has unearthed an obscure account published in 1842 of the travels in Malta of a certain Dr J. Davy, who
observed cart ruts between Marfa and Wied il-Qammieh in northwest Malta, and from their interrupted nature at the edge of the cliffs, inevitably concluded that the Maltese islands had once been significantly larger during the presence of man in Malta.32
Now it may well be that the submerged ruts we’ve dived on off Marfa Point will ultimately prove to pose no problem to orthodox chronology. That is perfectly possible if land subsidence has been the major factor in their inundation. But even so, they should be seen in context of the wider phenomenon of submerged ruts – contiguous to many different stretches of the Maltese coast – which have been reported in the past. Indeed, Anton Mifsud demonstrates that ‘before their gradual disappearance over the past few decades’ the ruts were ‘repeatedly and validly associated’ by scholars and travellers with a former extension of Malta’s landmass.33 ‘In several maritime sites around the island of Malta,’ wrote Sanzio in 1776, ‘one could see deep cart ruts in the rock that extended for long distances into the sea.’34 And in 1804 De Boisgelin believed he had found evidence that:
Some serious disruptions and subsidings have taken place on the island … An extraordinary subsidence … must have occurred on the coast not far from the pleasure grounds of Boschetto [Buskett] … on the southern side of which vestiges of wheels have cut into the rock, and may be traced to the sea … and the ruts may be perceived underwater at a great distance, and to a great depth; indeed as far as the eye can possibly distinguish anything through the waves …35
Father Emmanuel Magri, the first official excavator of the Hypogeum at Hal Saflieni, recorded the presence up until the end of the nineteenth century of cart-ruts on the tiny uninhabited island of Filfla36 – which lies some 5 kilometres south of the twinned megalithic temples of Mnajdra and Hagar Qim in the same general area of Malta’s south coast. And in 1912, R. N. Bradley commented on cart ruts near Hagar Qim – noting that they ran ‘over the precipitous edge of the cliff towards Filfla’.37 In subsequent years the ruts in both places have been completely obliterated (in the case of Filfla by sustained naval bombardments – the island was for a long while a favoured spot for target-practice). Nevertheless, as Mifsud observes, the combined effect of Magri’s and Bradley’s testimony is to suggest that cart-ruts once ran all the way from Hagar Qim to Filfla passing across a land-bridge that has therefore been submerged since human beings first came to the islands.38
In what he would be the first to admit is an untested hypothesis, Mifsud proposes a cataclysmic collapse of the Malta-Filfla land-bridge as a result of rifting processes in relatively recent prehistory – just over 4000 years ago – and he links this hypothetical cataclysm with the seemingly abrupt demise of the temple-building civilization of Malta around 2200 BC.39
We have finished our work at Clapham Junction and the helicopter is now running east at 150 metres along Malta’s south coast between Ghar Lapsi and the Blue Grotto. To our left, nestled into the slope of the island, is the colossal edifice of Mnajdra and above it on the hilltop stands Hagar Qim. To our right, across the open waters of the Mediterranean, is Filfla.
No diving is presently allowed around Filfla, and the entire area has been designated a closed nature reserve. But I can’t help wondering – what lies beneath those waters other than unspent ordnance from the years of bombardment? Could there be the remains of a lost civilization there? Perhaps on the sea-bed between Hagar Qim and Filfla – as on the sea-bed off the Qawra and Marfa Points and off Sliema too – some of the mysterious antecedents of Malta’s extraordinary temple-building culture are waiting to be found?
Hubertworld … (7)
Malta,15 November 1999
The lutzu was there after all, but it had drifted far away. It was obvious, since we could hardly see it, that Santha and the others on board certainly could not see us, especially when the swell carried us down – as it often did – into deep troughs in the waves. I knew that Santha would be beginning to be concerned by now, although she might not be expecting us to surface for some minutes yet if she had been assuming a shallower dive than we had in fact made.
Time passed and the sea was getting higher. Arrigo and I bobbed a few metres apart, beginning to feel cold, not talking because that required energy. Although my BCD was fully inflated, I found that I was constantly inhaling sea-water as waves splashed into my face or rolled me momentarily under. At the same time I found myself reluctant to take air through my regulator from the miserable 50 bar or less that was left in my tank; I might need that for a real emergency.
We tried waving – futile, of course in waves so high. We tried blowing the pathetic little whistles that manufacturers attach to BCDs and that cannot be heard at 5 metres if there’s a wind blowing. There was a wind blowing.
Then Arrigo connected up a power-whistle that had been concealed in an emergency kit somewh
ere on his person to the inflator hose on his BCD and pressed the button. For two seconds the air was filled with an ear-splitting howl that could have been heard on the other side of the island. Then the noise suddenly stopped.
Arrigo cursed: ‘Not enough pressure. It’s supposed to work down to 50 bar.’
There was no sign of the distant lutzu charging course. If they had heard us it had not been long enough to get a bearing.
‘But you’ve got 70 bar,’ I pointed out.
Arrigo shook his head. ‘Don’t think so. Maybe a faulty guage. How much do you have?’
‘Less than 50 bar.’
‘Shit! Still, give it a try and see what happens.’
I took the whistle from him, connected it to my inflator hose, pressed the button. Nothing.
‘Shit.’
We decided that we had better start swimming towards the shore, which by now seemed tremendously far away – had a current been carrying us out to sea all along? After ten minutes of effortful paddling, however, it became obvious that we had made no forward progress at all.
I floated on my back to catch my breath and, on the off-chance, decided to try the power whistle again. This time it worked at full blast and I kept the button pressed for several seconds, joyously observing as I did so that this time the lutzu was turning towards us. For a moment the whistle stopped, then started again, and I got three more good blasts out of it before it packed up completely. But the emergency was over. We’d been spotted and, after some manoeuvrings, were recovered into the lutzu from the increasingly wild sea.
Back on board, still in my wetsuit and drinking hot tea, I did not realize how close our escape had really been until I saw the massive Valletta-to-Gozo car-ferry bearing down relentlessly on our last position in the water before the recovery.
We had been snatched out of its path with just a few minutes to spare.
Bird’s-eye view … (8)
Malta, 24 June 2001
After the helicopter has made the run over the Ice Age valley long since inundated by the waters of the Mediterranean that once plunged between the two high points of Hagar Qim and Filfla, we circle back to take a closer look at Hagar Qim and at its ‘paired’ temple Mnajdra.
In total the remains of twenty-three megalithic structures classified by archaeologists as temples have been found in Malta – of which, according to Dr David Trump’s authoritative Archaeological Guide,
six stand alone, ten are in pairs, and there is one group of three and one of four. Five more structures of similar type have irregular plans, and there are at least twenty scatters of megalithic blocks … which could represent the last vestiges of former temples … It is on the whole unlikely that many more remain to be discovered. The number destroyed without trace we shall never know.40
All the temples were supposedly built between 3600 and 2500 BC,41 with the bulk of the work completed before 3200 BC.42 The best known on the tourist circuit today are Gigantija on Gozo, and Tarxien, Hagar Qim and Mnajdra on Malta. Other important temples, though smaller and less often visited, include Mgarr and Skorba, Tal Qadi and Bugibba. In a peculiarly Maltese compromise, the latter, near our dive site at Qawra Point, has been engulfed and partially ingested by the modern Dolmen Hotel.43
The pilot holds the helicopter stationary over Hagar Qim, giving us a bird’s-eye view of its impressive perimeter megaliths, which include one 7 metres high that is estimated to weigh more 20 tonnes.44 As at Gigantija the shape of the temple is defined by graceful curves and re-entrants and it contains a series of paired apsidal rooms, also lined with megaliths. From above, the oval arrangement of the apses make them seem almost like enormous eggs lying in a huge stone nest and I am struck again by the strangeness and uniqueness of this design and by the odd fact, pointed out with some bemusement by David Trump, that ‘There is nothing looking remotely like one of these temples outside the Maltese Islands.’45
We circle several times, then bank downhill towards the coast where Mnajdra lies – the last stop on our magical mystery tour. Although it is a spacious conglomerate of three temples (the ‘Small Temple’, the ‘Middle Temple’ and the ‘Lower Temple’), Mnajdra can at first sight seem almost inconsequential, tucked away as it is in rugged terrain against a hillside. The lower temple and the middle temple each have four of the characteristic megalithic apses arranged in two opposed pairs. The small temple is ‘trefoil’ in plan – with three apses arranged like a three-leafed clover.
I remember how, a year previously – on 20 June 2000 – I’d watched the summer solstice sunrise from within the lower temple at Mnajdra courtesy of Reuben Grima. It was then as the rays of the sun were projected on to a great megalith flanking the south side of the central axis that I understood for the first time how subtle and pure, how understated and yet how purposive, was the architectural genius of its builders. These people, who could achieve the most precise and painstaking alignments in the medium of cumbersome and gigantic stone, had not only been master architects and engineers – and first-class observational astronomers – but also excellent practical mathematicians and geometers. And all of this, presumably, had been harnessed to something else, some greater or transcendant objective that was somehow expressed in the temples.
Our hour is nearly up. The pilot banks away from Mnajdra and we head back towards the airport. In the last few minutes of the flight I find myself returning to the basic conundrum that has exercised my imagination in Malta since 1999, when I first involved myself here. It’s the absence of background to the temples, the fact that they’re suddenly just there, almost ready-made – without any obvious antecedents. And the fact that ancient megalithic or rock-hewn structures appear to exist underwater at several points around the archipelago -suggesting an older episode of construction that prehistorians have not yet taken account of.
Despite archaeological and C-14 evidence to the contrary, the existence of which I freely acknowledge, I think the time has come to consider the possibility that the origins of Malta’s megalithic temples and its mysterious Hypogeum might not be confined exclusively to the fourth millennium BC, as we have hitherto been taught, and that these amazing structures might have far older and far more mysterious roots.
16 / Cave of Bones
To sleep within the Goddess’s womb was to die and to come to life anew.
Marija Gimbutas
There are places in the world made by people gone before us – hallowed places, places of power – in which the art and architecture serve as mantras that dilate the spirit. In some cases it is possible to trace back a sacred history of the site that long predates any surviving structures and symbolism there – suggesting that we may be in the presence of something numinous in the location itself to which human beings of all epochs and faiths can respond.
Without any intention of giving an inclusive list I might mention Chartres Cathedral and the prehistoric painted caves of Lascaux and Chauvet in France, Altamira in Spain, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the Temple of Seti I and the Osireion at Abydos in Upper Egypt, the Great Pyramid of Giza in Lower Egypt, the Bayon at the heart of Angkor Thorn in Cambodia, the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in Greece, the rock shrines of Mount Miwa in Japan, Machu Picchu in Peru, Stonehenge in England …
And the Hypogeum of Hal Saflieni in Malta.
Imagine yourself at the entrance to an underground labyrinth with a footprint of half a square kilometre in the horizontal dimension measured out across three irregularly shaped levels stacked on top of one another in the vertical dimension – and the whole plunged in sepulchral darkness. This labyrinth, descending into the bowels of the earth, is the Hypogeum. It is thought by archaeologists to have been created earlier than 3000 BC. Some have speculated that its hive of interconnected chambers may first have begun to take shape naturally millions of years ago as solution cavities in the bedrock which were later expanded and reshaped by man. But the late J. D. Evans, formerly Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of London and a great author
ity on Malta, argues that the Hypogeum was entirely man-made from top to bottom and from the very beginning of the enterprise. Evans points out that even the crudest, most cave-like chambers exhibit certain features, ‘such as the clever use of natural faults in the soft rock to provide ready-made walls and ceilings’ that ‘point to a human rather than a natural origin’.1
There is controversy about the Hypogeum, as we shall see. But one matter about which there has been no disagreement is that the people who carved it out were the same people who built the great megalithic temples like Gigantija and Hagar Qim above ground on the Maltese islands. Even the general architectural style of the rock-hewn features within the Hypogeum self-evidently belongs to the same ‘school’ as the free-standing temples. Indeed, fragments of pottery from almost all the recognized phases of the temple-building period -and even from before it in the so-called Zebbug phase thought to date back to 4000 BC have been excavated from within the Hypogeum.2
Hypogeum floorplan and cross-section. Based on Evans (1971).
But next to nothing is known about the temple-builders themselves. We do not know what language they spoke. They have left us no script to decipher that might shed light on their rituals, customs, history and beliefs. There are no records elsewhere in the world from so ancient a period that refer to them. So their extraordinary works of art and stone that have endured the passage of the ages are now the only means we have to access all that is most interesting about them – in other words, their religious and philosophical ideas and the level of intellectual development of their culture.