The spaces within the Hypogeum, like the clover-leaf lobes of the megalithic temples, feel womb-like rather than strictly ‘architectural’.
Some of the chambers were washed from top to bottom in red ochre, enhancing the organic effect.
Others were gracefully painted with spirals, disks, volutes, honeycomb-patterns, animal figures, hand-prints and ideograms – the majority in red ochre, a few in black manganese dioxide pigment.
Here a cavernous circular hall was hewn out of the bedrock.
There a ‘window’ was cut at eye-level into the wall of a passage and then an area beyond was hollowed out with infinite care to create an ovoid cist about the height of a man that can only be accessed through the window.
A few paces to the west along the same wall, an elliptical hollow a metre deep was carved. It eerily amplifies low-pitched voice tones while absorbing higher notes like a sponge.
Over here a graceful gallery was hewn.
Over there the rough, blank face of the bedrock was first chiselled into a sweeping curve, then carved and penetrated to create a lintelled megalithic gateway leading to further galleries beyond.
The lintel was painted with a pattern of twelve disks in red ochre.
Above, ceilings were cut here so lofty that they recede from view and there so low that you must stoop to pass beneath them.
Below, the floor was left rough in places, chiselled smooth in others, treacherous curbs and drops were created, and a stairway descending into the lowest depths was left hanging in mid-air after six steps down with a straight fall of 2 metres below it.
Altogether thirty-three major ‘rooms’ have been defined within the labyrinth. Of these eight are on the upper level, nineteen on the middle level and six on the lowest level. Some of the rooms have as many as four subsidiary chambers branching off them and multiple entrances and exits connecting to the wider network weaving through the entire edifice.3
The result, in the end, as we may still experience it, is a surreal underworld of stairways and chambers, galleries, pits, and tunnels interconnected with sinuous passages and shafts – like a game of three-dimensional snakes and ladders.
‘No special importance was attached to it …’
I have explored the Hypogeum twice.
The first time was in June 2000 when it had been closed to the public for almost a decade (as with my entry to Mnajdra at dawn on the summer solstice in the same year, this private visit was arranged at short notice, courtesy of Reuben Grima of the National Museum).
My second opportunity came when I was in Malta in June 2001 with the Channel 4 film crew. Although the Hypogeum had been reopened by then, we were allowed to work in it out of hours under the benign supervision of Joe Farrugia, the curator.
There is ambiguous evidence that someone, or several people, might have entered some parts of the Hypogeum in the nineteenth century, and possibly even earlier in the seventeenth century,4 but the official story today is that it was discovered in 1902 after being sealed off for millennia. Two blocks of houses were being built on the land immediately above it in the township of Paola. Bell-shaped water-tanks cut out of the bedrock were a standard feature of Maltese homes of the period and the discovery was made by construction workers cutting one such tank. They broke through into a rock-hewn chamber below the cistern and from there were able to enter ‘the main halls of the monument’.5 Subsequently other parts of the Hypogeum were also exposed as more cisterns were cut:
The builder did not report his discovery to the authorities immediately, but used the underground chambers as handy dumping grounds for stones and debris to save himself the trouble of carting away the useless material. When the houses were ready the owners in a casual way informed some Government officials of the existence of the Hypogeum. The place was visited, but being full of rubbish and swamped with water no special importance was at first attached to it. The Government, however, appointed a Committee to report on the discovery, and in 1903 the place became Public Property.6
The doctor and the Jesuit
The first scholar to visit the Hypogeum was the eminent Maltese medical man and polymath, Dr A. A. Caruana, who spent 29 December 1902 there at the request of the British authorities.7 Caruana was not able to excavate, merely inspect, but he commented particularly on a rather macabre sight. The lowest level of the underground labyrinth proved to contain ‘a great quantity of human skulls and bones … heaped over each other and at random’.8
In 1903 official excavations started under the supervision of Father Emmanuel Magri, a Jesuit priest and one of the members of the management committee of the Valletta Museum. Magri began by sinking a shaft deep into the rock to create the modern entrance to the Hypogeum in its middle level. All the rubbish left behind by the builders was then removed via this shaft. After that followed tonnes of ‘dark dank earth’ that seemed to have been deposited throughout the structure at some time in antiquity. According to contemporary observers, this deposit was uniformly ‘full of fragments of bones, pottery and other small objects’.9 The pottery and small objects were saved; the bones were placed in a heap for daily disposal by the works foreman and never heard of again.10 Thus began a story of neglect, muddles and bizarre losses of prime archaeological evidence from the Hypogeum – a story that continues to the present day.
Soon after clearing the central chambers, Magri was called away by the Jesuits to save souls abroad and died suddenly at Sfax in Tunisia in 1907. He had not yet published any report on his work in the Hypogeum and the notebooks that he was known to have kept in which he had recorded the details of his excavations mysteriously disappeared after his death.11 Perhaps the Jesuits have them.
The consequence at any rate, as David Trump admits, is that though most of the objects and pottery excavated by Magri have been preserved, ‘no record of their context or associations survives’.12 Since full details of provenance are essential if an informed archaeological judgement is to be made, or a chronological sequence proposed, the value of the finds is thus greatly reduced.
The godfather
After Magri came Themistocles (later Sir Temi) Zammit, the renowned ‘godfather of Maltese archaeology’, who was at this time Curator of the Valletta Museum. His careful and systematic excavations at the Hypogeum removed the remaining deposits uncleared by Magri, including the bone-filled earthy mass in the lowest storey which Caruana had noticed in 1902. The nature of this mass was described at some length by Zammit in the official report of his excavations published in 1910:
A dark compact deposit was found which showed nowhere signs of having been disturbed. In this old deposit no stratification was observed and in caves which were cleared inch by inch, the deposit was always of the same type and contained objects of the same quality. The deposit of the large caves, about a metre in depth, was made of the red earth one finds in our fields and in this, bones and potsherds were intimately mixed … disjointed and confusedly massed … Very few bodies were found lying in a natural position and no special arrangements such as trenches, sepulchres, stone enclosures etc., were met with, anywhere, intended to receive a body.13
For example in one cave:
Not a single [skeleton] was found lying with bones in position … At least 120 skeletons were buried in a space of 3.17 by 1.2 by 1 m. This is enough to show that a regular interment was out of the question as not more than 12 bodies could be laid in such a limited space.14
In a separate publication in 1912, coauthored with T. E. Peet and R. N. Bradley, Zammit confirmed that:
No complete skeletons came to light, and the bones lay in confusion through the soil as in the rest of the Hypogeum, except that occasionally an arm with fingers, and a complete foot, and several vertebrae would be found lying with the parts in situ. From the upright position of an isolated radius it might be judged that the filling up of the cave was of a wholesale nature, rather than that individual burials took place in it … unrelated bones and also implements were found in the interior of skulls ??
? Animal bones were found mingled with human.15
Altogether, Zammit calculated, the skeletons of somewhere between 6000 and 7000 individuals lay tangled and mashed up together within the Hypogeum.16 One of his students, W. A. Griffiths, who wrote a report on the excavations in National Geographic magazine in 1920, put a higher figure on the record:
Most of the rooms were found to be half filled with earth, human bones and broken pottery. It has been estimated that the ruins contained the bones of 33,000 persons … Practically all were found in the greatest disorder …17
Let’s assume Griffiths’ figure, not repeated elsewhere in the literature, is a mistake and stick with the lower total of 6000 to 7000 individuals. What were they doing there? And how (other than with howls of outrage and disbelief) are we to receive the official admission, already reported in chapter 15, that almost none of this vast horde of prehistoric bones has been preserved? Professor J. D. Evans was by no means overstating the gravity of the matter when he described the disappearance of the remains as ‘an irreparable loss to Maltese archaeology’.18 And that was in 1971 when the National Museum still had eleven of the Hypogeum skulls in its possession.19 By 2001, as we’ve seen, only six were left.
Travel plans
June 2000
I first went to Malta in November 1999 because of the rumours of an underwater temple off Sliema reported in chapter 15. My dives that November were arduous and unproductive. But I kept an open mind and determined that I would return the following summer in better weather. I rarely plan things far in advance, but it was obvious that we should be there in June, and very specifically around 21 June – the summer solstice – in order to see the wondrous light effect, contrived by the ancients, that occurs at sunrise at the megalithic temple of Mnajdra. At least that was a sure thing, and worth making the journey for in its own right, even if the diving turned out, as I feared it would, to be a bust for the second time running.
Since solstice alignments usually work equally well on 20, 21 and 22 June (the sun’s rising point in the east and setting point in the west hardly change at all during the entire three days), Santha and I scheduled to be at Mnajdra on the 20th and then to fly on to Tenerife in the Canary islands to observe some more solar magic on the 21st – this time at sunset – that had been reported in a group of mysterious pyramids in the little town of Guimar recently excavated by the explorer Thor Heyerdahl. We would meet Heyerdahl at Guimar for the very first shoot of my Channel 4 TV series on the 21st. Afterwards the film crew would return to England but Santha and I would stay on in Tenerife for a few days to check out claims by local divers to have seen ‘strange things’ underwater at several points around this volcanic Atlantic island – including ‘towers made of huge blocks of stone’ and a cross (also ‘huge’) formed by two straight channels intersecting at right angles and seemingly carved into a lava flow on the sea-bed at 27 metres.
From Tenerife the final leg of our June 2000 journey, now spilling into July, would take us to Alexandria in Egypt. There, as reported in chapter 1, we had arranged to meet Ashraf Bechai for 10 days of diving to see if we could relocate the parallel walls of giant regular blocks that he remembered seeing years before underwater off Sidi Gaber.
A temple, or a tomb … or something else?
What was the Hypogeum of Hal Saflieni for? Presumably its makers must have had a specific function in mind when they invested so much time, energy and human labour in its creation. But what?
J. D. Evans, the most influential of the group of archaeologists who made their names in Malta during the second half of the twentieth century, is reticent on this subject. Concluding a 15,000-word dissertation, which guides us through every room and corridor of the Hypogeum with all the verve, passion and originality of a refrigerator manual, he writes: ‘This completes the description of the monument. A few words must now be said about its nature and purpose. In later years Sir Themistocles Zammit was of the opinion …’20 We then get a summary of Zammit’s opinions. In 1910, notes Evans, the great man had believed that ‘the Hypogeum was in part used as a sanctuary in which religious ceremonies were conducted, and in part as a burial place in which the bones of the dead were deposited after being deprived of the flesh’.21 In later years, however, he
was of the opinion that it was an underground temple, roughly analogous in function to the stone-built ones above ground, though perhaps also used for special initiation rites, and that only at some later time was it used for the burial of the large number of people whose remains were found in it.22
And what of Evans’ own opinion, set down in his authoritative 1971 survey, The Prehistoric Antiquities of the Maltese Islands: ‘In point of fact, there is no cogent reason against, and much evidence in favour of, the primary use of the Hypogeum as a place of burial. It is its use as the locus of a cult which, if anything, may be secondary …’?23 He only momentarily allows himself to speculate, but when he does so he gets interesting:
Even admitting that a certain amount of cult activity must have gone on in the inner halls of the Hypogeum, the number of persons involved must have been very small. The Hypogeum was at no time a place of public worship, as the stone temples seem to have been. Had it been so the smoke of the flares and torches necessary to provide adequate light must have stained and blackened the porous limestone of the walls and ceilings, whereas in fact no traces of this can be seen. The Hypogeum was in all probability never fully illuminated in antiquity? its magnificently carved and painted halls were perhaps only half apprehended in a flickering and uncertain light by a few privileged or dedicated persons.24
Dr David Trump, another of the acknowledged experts on Maltese prehistory, speculates that the Hypogeum ‘began as a simple rock-cut tomb [and] became elaborated to include a funerary chapel at its heart’.25
Colin Renfrew, in Before Civilization, describes Hal Saflieni as ‘a great charnel house’ but also notes: ‘The main chamber has an imitation façade which almost certainly mimics the temples above the ground.’26
So some sort of a combination between a tomb and a temple, with perhaps just a smidgeon of dimly lit cultic or initiatory behaviour grafted on, seems to be a fair summary of the gamut of orthodox opinion as to the function of the Hypogeum.
The Goddess and the Sleeping Lady
Zammit, Evans, Trump and Renfrew do represent orthodox opinion on this matter. They’re the heavy hitters. Centre Court at Wimbledon. In their league only the late Marija Gimbutas, formerly Professor of European Archaeology at UCLA, takes a divergent approach – and even she does not question the basic, seemingly obvious, assumptions that the Hypogeum was used as a burial place and that rituals of some kind must have been performed within it as well. She likewise accepts, without examination, the orthodox chronology for the construction of the labyrinth (3600–2500 BC).27 For these reasons, though radical, her view is not so divergent from the mainstream position as it can sometimes appear. Rather, she works within the same framework but places less emphasis in her analysis on burial at the Hypogeum than on the cultic activities and initiation rituals that she believes were also performed there.
Gimbutas, who passed away in 2001, is one of the leading proponents of an intriguing hypothesis about who was who and what was what in prehistory. It concerns the distinctive carved and/or painted figures of enormously fat women that have been found in many European Neolithic sites (c.7000–4000 BC) and the almost equally numerous and virtually identical examples going far back into the world of Palaeolithic cave art (the Venus of Laussel, c.30,000 BC; the Venus of Lespugue, c.25,000 BC, etc.).28 According to Gimbutas and others who have entered this fray, these figures are the symbols and representations of an archetypal ‘Mother Goddess’ figure – simultaneously the Goddess of Fertility, the Goddess of Death and the Goddess of Rebirth – whose worship was ancient and must once have been extremely widespread.29 Whether we find her painted, carved in relief out of the rock wall of a cave (as in the celebrated example of Laussel), or in the form of a free-s
tanding sculpture, the Goddess is usually represented as an imposing, hugely fat woman with dangling breasts, egg-shaped buttocks and bulging calves and forearms. It is therefore noteworthy that many figures exactly matching this description have been excavated from Malta’s megalithic temples, including two in repose – usually referred to as ‘the Sleeping Ladies’ – that were found in the Hypogeum itself.
‘The Hypogeum’, notes Gimbutas:
with its rooms painted liberally with red ochre wash, represents the Goddess’s regenerative womb … An indication of the religious use of these womb-shaped chambers are the figurines of Sleeping Ladies lying stretched out on low couches, associated with two cubicles opening into the Main Hall. The more articulate one, known as ‘The Sleeping Lady of the Hypogeum’, is a true masterpiece. This generously rounded lady with egg-shaped buttocks lies on her side, asleep, almost visibly dreaming. Why is she sleeping in the tomb? One explanation is that this represents a rite of initiation or incubation. To sleep within the Goddess’s womb was to die and to come to life anew. The Sleeping Lady could also be a votive offering from one who successfully passed through the rite of incubation in the Hypogeum …30
I have stood before the Sleeping Lady of the Hypogeum many times. Her exact provenance within the labyrinth is not as simple a matter as Gimbutas thinks because she was excavated by the ill-fated Father Magri. All we know, and that is hearsay, is that she was found in a ‘deep pit of one of the painted rooms’.31 These days she occupies a glass case mounted on a slender plinth in a cubicle at the rear of the National Archaeological Museum in Valletta. The cubicle is dimly lit and the tiny clay figure, just 12 centimetres long, seems to float in space, sleeping if she is sleeping, dreaming if she is dreaming …