So it is clearly not enough, if one wishes to propose something so radical and upsetting as a Palaeolithic human presence in Malta, merely to offer apparent similarities in religious iconography, apparent similarities in artistic styles, apparently similar types of pigments used, etc. Such impressions are all very well, and even helpful, but the interpretation of them is bound to be subjective. What is needed in addition to all this is solid empirical evidence – from scientific tests supported by reliable provenance and stratigraphy – that confirms a more ancient presence of man.
Naturally Anton Mifsud would not have embarked on his course of confrontation with the archaeological authorities over the basic terms of Maltese prehistory if he did not possess such evidence. He does. And in the process of acquiring it, as we shall see, he has uncovered some very strange and disturbing archaeological behaviour that took place during the 1950s and 1960s. This was the precise period in which the foundations of Maltese prehistory were being laid down by Professor J. D. Evans. It is not an accident that this was also the period when the islands became defined as ‘apalaeolithic’ – i.e., not inhabited by humans before the Palaeolithic – a definition that has been taught to later generations of archaeologists as dogma. The scandal has even gone so far as to entangle the Natural History Museum in London in its clutches and to resurrect the restless ghost of Piltdown Man.
27. Mahabalipuram seashore at dawn with people gathering to watch the sunrise. Shore temple is in the background to the left. Local traditions speak of extensive underwater ruins.
28. The Meenaksi temple, Madurai, with its sacred Tank (right foreground).
29. Arunachela temple, Tiruvannamalai.
30. Arunachela, the sacred red mountain of Tiruvannamalai, embodying the presence of Lord Siva. The temple nestles at its foot.
31. Siva devotees on the slopes of Arunachela overlooking the great rectangle of the temple.
32. The author interviewing fishermen, Mahabalipuram. Stories of underwater ruins are commonplace along this coast.
33. The author with NIO team and fishermen at Poompuhur on the way out to the dive boat.
34. Local fishermen directly over the U-shaped structure at Poompuhur. Underwater structures provide attractive shelters for fish.
35. Side-wall of the U-shaped structure, Poompuhur, looming out of the murk. The structure was submerged about 11,000 years ago.
36. The author diving on the U-shaped structure, Poompuhur, at a depth of 23 metres and 5 kilometres from shore. Diving conditions here are difficult, with poor visibility.
37. U-shaped structure, Poompuhur.
38. Curved trench or passage in U-shaped structure, Poompuhur.
39. The author diving on the U-shaped structure, Poompuhur.
40. The author with the NIO’s team of marine archaeologists. Kamlesh Vora is at the extreme right. The author is flanked by Sundaresh and A. S. Gaur.
18 / The Masque of the Green Book
We have no reason to suppose that Palaeolithic man ever set foot on Malta.
J. D. Evans, 19591
The conspiracy of silence over the decades represents the triumph of prejudice over logic.
Anton Mifsud, 19972
The whole thing is in limbo, really …
David Trump, October 20013
When did people first live on the Maltese islands? The question seems innocent and simple enough – almost routine – but evidence that has a bearing on it has been tampered with and lost, and the search for the correct answer to it is the fundamental issue of Maltese prehistory. Because of Malta’s special place in the wider story of civilization it is a fundamental issue of global prehistory as well. For how can we claim to have understood the origins of civilization if we have failed to unravel properly the processes and motivations, the skills and the ideas, that led up to the creation of humanity’s first ever works of monumental religious architecture?4
And what architecture it is!
Not simple rough-and-ready building experiments as one might expect, but beautiful, accomplished, harmonious structures that were the work of master architects, planners and stone masons, from the very beginning.
Not monuments that were easy to make, but monuments that were extremely difficult to make – and that would be difficult to make in any epoch, with any technology.
Monuments like Gigantija, described in chapter 15, with its walls of 5 metre tall megaliths.
Monuments like the Hypogeum, an incredible achievement of troglodytic burrowing and hewing to create a mysterious labyrinth beneath the earth.
Monuments like Hagar Qim and Mnajdra that feature astronomical and solar alignments requiring years of careful observations and measurements to confirm and install.
So what was going on in Malta that led to all this? Why did the first megalithic temple-builders in the world choose to make things so difficult for themselves? Why didn’t they start with small megaliths (if that is not too serious a contradiction in terms)? Why didn’t they start simple? Why did they plunge straight into the very complicated stuff, like Gigantija and the Hypogeum? And, having plunged, how did they manage to produce such magnificent results? Was it beginner’s luck? Or were their achievements as humanity’s pioneering architects the product of some sort of heritage?
Beginner’s luck is possible, but having studied the earliest temples, and their level of perfection, archaeologists agree that heritage is the right answer. The only problem is what heritage? And where is it to be looked for? Since it is the received wisdom that no human beings lived on Malta before 5200 BC, and since this is a ‘fact’ that is at present unquestioned anywhere within conventional scholarship, archaeologists from roughly the mid-twentieth century onwards have simply seen no reason to explore the possibility that the heritage of the Maltese temples might be older than 5200 BC. To do so would be the research equivalent of an oxymoron – like breeding dodos, trying to conduct an interview with William Shakespeare or seeking evidence that the earth is flat – and would invite the ridicule of one’s peers.
The result, necessarily, is that archaeological inquiry into the origins of monumental civilization in Malta has been confined to the narrow chronological band between 5200 BC – the supposed date the islands were first settled -and 3600 BC, the supposed date that Gigantija was built. Whatever alchemy transformed the rude and unimpressive stone and brickwork of the Maltese of the fifth millennium BC into the awe-inspiring cyclopean temples of the fourth millennium BC is therefore – again necessarily – to be traced within this period, not outside it. The only possible external and earlier influence that might reasonably be countenanced by proponents of this model could, as noted in chapter 16, lie in ‘intellectual baggage’ that the original Neolithic settlers presumed to have first colonized Malta from Sicily in 5200 BC – the Stentinello culture – might have brought with them. But the evidence is against this, since the Stentinello people of Sicily did not develop a megalithic culture and, indeed, there are ‘no true megalithic monuments’ at all anywhere in Sicily.5
So we’re back to Malta again, confronted by the massive physical presence of the world’s first monumental architecture. And since it assaults common sense to suggest that such huge and accomplished temples could be the work of people who had never built with megaliths before, we’re searching for the intermediate structures on which the Maltese stone masons presumably must have learned their craft during the first 1600 years that there were people at all on Malta -i.e. between 5200 and 3600 BC.
5200–3600 BC, the archaeologists’ story
Ghar Dalam 5200–4500 BC
The first phase of human settlement that archaeologists recognize, 5200–4500 BC, is known as the Ghar Dalam phase. The name is from the type site, Ghar Dalam cave itself, but the ‘Phase’, defined by its pottery and tools, is represented at sites throughout Malta and Gozo. This phase has left no evidence of any large-scale construction activities at all. Nor is it easy to make out any of the signs of organized cultic and religious behaviour
that normally precede full-blown temple worship. All that has come down to us are a few traces of rudimentary huts and shelters and a stumpy wall, 11 metres long but less than a metre high, made of two rows of small upright slabs with a filling of rubble in between.6
Skorba, 4500–4100 BC
Archaeologists identify a second phase immediately following Ghar Dalam, of which the type site is Skorba (not to be confused with the megalithic temple at Skorba – itself of the Gigantija phase and later! – which stands near by). The dates of the Skorba phase are 4500–4100 BC and there is no doubt that the architecture does get bigger and more impressive during these 400 years. Indeed, Trump proposes, and some of his colleagues agree with him, that two oval rooms at Skorba which have been carbon-dated to 4100 BC may actually be the first precursors of the later temple architecture.7 The pebbled courtyard of the northern room is partially covered by the eastern side of the temple, providing a clear sequence, in full accord with orthodox chronology, in which the Skorba phase, and its C-14 date, precede the Gigantija and later phases of the temple -with all the phases nicely stacked up one on top of the other on the same site.
Trump thinks that the two rooms may have been basements, ‘as the southern one had no doorway through its massive walls’. The northern room, on the other hand, was entered by way of the pebbled courtyard mentioned above.8 Within the rooms:
The irregularity of the floors and the unlevelled surface of the bedrock argue against domestic use, and the group of figurines … from the northern room also suggest that this building had a religious function, a true predecessor, then, of the temples which appeared some centuries later. The main difference in construction was that the upper walls had been built in mud-brick shaped from Maltese blue clay.9
I must protest in passing that while irregular unlevelled bedrock floors do argue against domestic use they do not inevitably suggest that that building had a religious function (all the later temples had levelled floors). Conversely, the figurines that Trump mentions do suggest a religious function similar to that of the temples and the Hypogeum since they include ‘female figurines, stylized and with greatly exaggerated buttocks’.10
On the basis of the oval shape of the rooms and the versions of the familiar goddess images found within them it is hard to disagree that there is a connection here. On the other hand, there is no trace whatsoever of megalithic architecture in these oval rooms from 4100 BC. Their walls may be ‘massive’, as Trump suggests, but the architectural and engineering challenges faced in building them are not to be compared in any way with the challenges that faced the temple-builders.
So, yes, the people of the Skorba phase did build big structures. And yes, they do seem to have venerated the Goddess within them. But the walls of these structures were made of small, easily handled stones and rubble packed together and surmounted by mud-bricks,11 so they can hardly be described in architectural and enginering terms as ‘intermediate’ steps on the way to the megalithic temples.
Zebbug, 4100–3800 BC
The next phase of Maltese prehistory is named Zebbug – as usual after the type site – and is dated from 4100 to 3800 BC. Archaeologists classify this phase as being within the ‘Temple period since it occupied that last five centuries before the construction of the first megalithic temples – during which time, it is assumed, Maltese society must have been gearing itself up in various ways for the colossal effort that lay ahead. The evidence for this gearing-up process is, however, not overwhelming. The Zebbug phase produced no megalithic architecture and no rock-hewn temples, but is identified by stylistic changes in pottery and distinguished by what are thought to be the first rock-hewn tombs in Malta – a group of five rather unimpressive dish-shaped depressions discovered in a field in the parish of Zebbug in 1947.12 A few are somewhat elliptical13 and might be said to bear comparison with the elliptical ‘theme’ of the temples and the Hypogeum – although none of the labyrinthine or subterranean characteristics of the latter are present at Zebbug.
A twin-chambered rock-cut tomb from the Zebbug phase has also been found on Gozo close to the temple of Gigantija. It is a collective tomb and consists of a vertical shaft approximately 1 metre deep opening into two low-roofed, shallow, rock-cut chambers that had been filled up, over many centuries, with the bones of fifty-four adults and eleven children:
Most of the bones were disarticulated and pushed to the back and sides of the chambers, as if to make way for a more recent burial. Indeed at the entrance to one of the chambers lay the contracted almost complete skeleton of an adult male, presumably the last of the burials.14
A stylized human bust of stone was placed at the entrance to one of the chambers, as if intended to guard the tomb.15
Other Zebbug phase tombs, at Xemxija, which feature kidney-shaped and ‘clover-leaf’ rock-hewn chambers devolving off a central shaft just under a metre deep, have been proposed by J. D. Evans as possible models for the characteristic kidney-shaped apsidal rooms of the megalithic temples – a view that David Trump also believes has ‘much to recommend it’.16
Mgarr, 3800–3600 BC
After the Zebbug phase – again rather loosely classified as being within the temple period but still before a single example of megalithic architecture had appeared, archaeologists insert the Mgarr phase, 3800–3600 BC.17 Essentially irrelevant to the quest for intermediate structures on which the temple-builders practised and honed their skills, Mgarr is classified by its pottery – ‘a transitional phase named after the site in Malta where a development in style of the Zebbug pottery was first noticed’.18
Gigantija
And then suddenly, around 3600 BC, the fireworks start to fly with the Gigantija phase (3600–3000 BC). Here, as we know, the type site is not a pottery heap, a mud-brick wall, or a few rock-cut tombs, but Gigantija herself – the ‘tower of the giants’ – literally the mother of all temples if the orthodox chronology is correct, built with megaliths that are consistently amongst the biggest ever used in Malta.
Know-how has to start somewhere
How are we to explain such a sudden and dramatic leap forward as the appearance in the Gigantija phase not only of the ‘blueprint’ for the archetypal Maltese megalithic temple – to which, with adaptations and refinements, all later temples adhere – but also, at the same instant, the complete suite of organizational and technical abilities necessary to build such temples when, we are told, none had ever been built before?
In a recent paper on the architecture of the Maltese temples, Trump admits there is a problem:
Know-how has to start somewhere. Though building in stone was first introduced to Malta by the first settlers, as was shown at Skorba, the use of huge blocks, so-called megalithic architecture, is not known before the temple period. The skills must have been built up slowly, over time.19
I am not an archaeologist, but after reviewing what archaeology has found out about the 1600 years between the supposed date of first settlement and the beginning of temple-building at Gigantija – 5200 BC down to 3600 BC – I personally see no convincing evidence of any build-up of skills ‘slowly, over time’ that would have been relevant to the construction of the megalithic temples.
I note that Trump and Evans both hint that the temples may somehow have evolved out of the shape of Zebbug phase tombs, and there is an undeniable resemblance. But even if we accept that the shape of the tombs of 4100 BC is related to the shape of the temples of 3600 BC – giving us 500 years of ‘evolution’ to explain the phenomenon of Gigantija – this still leaves unanswered the bigger question of how and where the ancient Maltese learned to reproduce such shapes, above ground, in megaliths weighing many tonnes?
Could the solution be that another wave of settlers arrived in 3600 BC bringing the temple blueprint and the necessary building skills with them? This was once a fashionable idea that has gone out of favour as the archaeology of Malta and of the Mediterranean as a whole has improved. As David Trump has recently affirmed, ‘There is nothing looking remo
tely like one of these temples outside the Maltese islands, so we cannot use “foreign influence”, to explain them away.’20 Likewise, far back as 1959 J. D. Evans wrote:
It is abundantly clear … that the Maltese temples and tombs were something indigenous, rooted in the beliefs and customs of the people whose religion they express, and they evolved step by step with these. There seems no question of their having been introduced as a result of influence from other cultures.21
So we have come full circle back to Malta again, still searching for the baby temples, the kid temples, the adolescent temples – or if not temples then other kinds of structures requiring the same skills – that ought to precede the mature, prime-of-life temples of the Gigantija and later phases. And they aren’t there.