GH: I see. And the platform itself is on bedrock?
Bonanno: The platform itself is on bedrock.
GH: Interesting, interesting. Have any samples been taken from underneath a megalith?
Bonanno: From underneath a megalith? I don’t remember any samples being taken from underneath megaliths.
GH: What’s troubling me is with the megalithic temples founded on bedrock and therefore no possibility of strata under the temple itself, how sure can we be about the contemporaneity of the organic samples that can be carbon-dated and the construction of the site? It doesn’t worry you about the dating of the megalithic structures themselves?
Bonanno: Not really, because anything underneath the megalith could be as old as 100,000 years. What, as an archaeologist, I would want to find is a stratum, a layer, which would be touching on, therefore sealing, a wall or part of a wall, because that is what would be telling me the date of the wall itself. Anything below could be as old as ever.
GH: Is there any megalithic temple in Malta where you have sealed secure carbon-dates from layers like that?
Bonanno: Skorba, yes, Skorba and the Xaghra [Borchtorff] Circle.
I’m not an archaeologist, but as a journalist it seems to me we are left with an awful lot of temples for which we have no carbon-dates at all and certainly no sealed secure ones. Worse still, the complete repertoire of radiocarbon-dates for the prehistory of the Maltese islands, upon which so many of our notions of the origins and chronology of its megalithic civilization depend, is, overall, extremely limited. I was surprised to discover that there are only twenty-seven official C-14 dates for the entire archipelago and that most of these are of equivocal quality. Moreover, twenty-two of the twenty-seven dates come from only two sites – eight from Skorba and fourteen from the Borchtorff Circle.20 Of the remaining five, one comes from Mgarr and is relatively secure, being wood charcoal retrieved from the under the floor. Logically, however, the most that it can tell us is the age of the floor itself – which may have been a restoration. It has no bearing on the age of the megalithic uprights since the excavator -J. D. Evans in 1954 – informs us that the sample was found just above the level on which the wall foundations were resting.21
Prehistoric Malta’s final four carbon-dates out of its grand total of twenty-seven are from Tarxien.22 Of these, one is wood charcoal from the first apse to the right in the South Temple. The remaining three are all described as ‘carbonized beans from cinerary urns’. On further investigation it transpires that these samples were found in glass jars in the National Museum of Malta labelled ‘Tarxien Cemetery’, which were assumed to contain the contents of cinerary urns excavated by Temi Zammit in 1915.23
Despite some significant anomalies and inconsistencies,24 I want to emphasize again that none of these C-14 samples undermine – and all generally support – the orthodox chronology of the rise and fall of Malta’s unique temple-building culture. Nor is it my purpose here to challenge that chronology – at any rate, not necessarily with reference to the temples that survive above water. But I do think that in too small a field monopolized by too small a group of archaeologists, too much has been claimed for too long on the basis of too little data. In consequence, the ‘out of Sicily’ hypothesis that ignores the Palaeolithic has thrived, and its supporters – quite naturally – have focused whatever scarce archaeological resources may be available on the search for further evidence to elaborate and confirm an exclusively Neolithic heritage for Malta.
So I don’t mind too much when the surviving megalithic temples were built. The counter-hypothesis that I offer for their origins is that they are the end-result of a very long process of development in Malta that began in the Palaeolithic and that has been veiled from us by rising sea-levels, cataclysmic land subsidence, academic mendacity and a self-protecting old boys’ club closing ranks.
A god of light and geometry
Mnajdra, 20 June 2001
It’s just after 6.05 a.m. and we are all gathered inside the northern apse of the lower temple, waiting for the sun to project an image on to the massive slab -the summer solstice stone – to the left of the central passageway in the southern apse. The image will be formed, Chris Micallef has explained, when half the solar disk is above the sloping natural horizon of the ridge. At that moment the sun’s rays, coming out of the north-east, will pass through the trilithion gateway, striking the inside edge of its northern upright and the underside of the lintel, thence diagonally across the entrance passage to strike the inside edge of a megalith at the south-west end of the passage, and finally across the southern apse to strike the summer solstice stone – in our epoch 2 centimetres from its southern edge. So the ‘slit’ through which the rays pass to form the projected image is not simply a gap in the masonry but a result of the careful juxtaposition of three different megaliths, two upright – but more than 4 metres apart at opposite ends of the entrance passage – and the third horizontal and more than 2 metres off the ground.
The morning light is mellow, warm, no harsh edges yet. There’s still some pink of dawn left in the sky. And the moon, almost full, floats high and pale above a great menhir that projects like a finger out of the south-west wall.
‘We should see the effect very soon,’ announces Chris. ‘And I would ask you to remember that it has maybe only a hundredth of the impact that it would have had in antiquity when the temple was fully roofed and dark inside. So you should try to imagine the effect suddenly materializing in a place of darkness.’
A few more minutes pass. I know what I should be looking out for and where I should see it, but I don’t see it yet. And in the back of my mind I’m absorbing Chris’s point about the roof, wondering how we can expect to see anything special at all under the present conditions. Isn’t there already way too much light inside the roofless temple for what is, after all, an effect composed entirely of light? Won’t it just wash out against the bright background?
Then I become aware of … a presence – a faint, ghostly glimmering, like moonglow, that has appeared on the solstice stone. I don’t know how long it lasts, a second or two only I would guess, but while it is there it seems less like a projection – which I know it to be – than something immanent within the stone itself. And it seems to function as a herald for it fades almost as soon as it has appeared and in its place the full effect snaps on – instantaneously. It wasn’t there, and then it’s there.
As Chris had described, the effect does curiously resemble a poleaxe, or a flag on a pole, and consists of a ‘shaft’, narrow at the base but widening a little towards the top, running up the left hand side of the solstice stone, surmounted by a right-facing ‘head’ or ‘flag’. An instant later an almond-shaped spot of light, like an eye, appears a few centimetres to the right of the ‘flag’ and the effect is complete.
A clear slit image is formed by the sun’s rays shining on the vertical stones inside the temple. Based on Micallef (1992).
Weirdly – I do not claim it has any significance – this flag-on-a-pole symbol is the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph neter, meaning ‘god’, or ‘a god’ – and not to be understood at all in the Judaeo-Christian usage of that word but rather as a reference to one of the supernatural powers or principals that guide and balance the universe.
Manifested here, in this strange Stone Age temple, it glows, as though lit by inner fire.
The cave at the foot of the cliff
Marfa Point, 22 June 2001, dive 1
We made three dives, two at the sites off Marfa Point in the north-west of the island that had been found by Rupert and Audrey Mifsud and one at the Qawra Point site in the north-east found by Chris Agius.
My storm god had taken a break, the day was calm and beautiful, and our dives were safe and unthreatening in seas entirely free of currents and waves. Also, for the first time ever in Malta, we just jumped in the water and went to the suspected man-made sites without any of the fruitless searching with echo-sounders and wasted hours zig-zagging backward and
forward that I had come to regard as normal here.
First Rupert led us over a level area covered in fields of waving sea-grass sloping down gently from 7 to about 10 metres. Then we came to the edge of a sheer underwater cliff dropping 15 metres to the sea-bed below. There we launched ourselves into blue space and drifted down the side of the drop-off like slow motion skydivers.
At the bottom, at 25 metres and in the sudden cold of a thermocline, was the opening to a cave. A very strange cave. I have never seen one like it before.
Its entrance was, I suppose, about 5 metres wide at the base and soared, narrowing, to half the height of the drop-off where the two sides came together to make the roof. Inside, I found that the floor of the cave was not horizontal but rose from the sea-bed at an angle of about 45 degrees forming, effectively, a steep ramp. The surface of the ramp, though overgrown, was surprisingly smooth and it was difficult to see how such a feature could have formed naturally in a setting like this. Besides, now that my eyes were becoming accustomed to the gloom, and in the beam of light from Rupert’s torch, I could see that some areas appeared to have been deliberately cut and quarried into shape.
Cave diving can be scary if the cave you are in is part of a system with many side branches, like a maze, or if it is so long that you cease to see the light filtering through the entrance behind you. But what makes caves really dangerous, and the reason that they regularly kill divers, is sediment.
Some years ago in Yonaguni, Japan, where I dive regularly, four leisure divers and an instructor were killed by sediment – not killed by it directly, of course, but killed by it because their finning stirred up centuries of silt piled on the cave-floor into a thick suspended mist. In it they became disoriented, confused and, tragically, could not find the exit before they ran out of air.
But this cave in Malta was not like that. It entrance was so wide and the cave itself so relatively shallow that it would be impossible to get lost in it, even in the worst conditions. Nevertheless, it was silty and the visibility was deteriorating steadily despite all our efforts.
About 5 metres inside, up near the top of the ramp, Rupert showed me what we had come to see – three large steps, or terraces, each about half a metre high and extending across the entire width of the cave. They were deeply covered in marine growth and layers of sediment but they seemed to be much too straight-edged and right-angled to have been shaped by any natural process -especially in such a sheltered position.
Two or 3 metres beyond them the cave terminated in a wall penetrated by a gap large enough for me to pass through – which I did without hesitation, since I could see light streaming in from the other side. The gap led to a second cave, in an entirely rough and natural state, with its own separate entrance. I swam back through the gap again and returned to the steps which, by now, were enshrouded in a fog of sediment.
Man-made, or natural? It certainly looked to me as though people had been at work in this cave cutting and shaping the rock to some design or plan of their own – as they had been over the millennia in Malta in so many caves and underground tunnels.
I allowed myself to float up to the roof, an easy move for a diver but something that would have been impossible without scaffolding when the cave was above water. Yet the roof of the cave was nicely cut and squared off, presenting an extremely symmetrical ‘frame’ of two verticals and a horizontal upright.
Underwater Clapham Junction
Marfa Point, 22 June 2001, dive 2
Our second dive at Marfa Point was on what Rupert called ‘the channels’. They were located on the plateau above the drop-off at a depth of about 8 metres and were immediately recognizable as part of the same phenomenon as the unquestionably man-made ‘cart-ruts’ at Clapham Junction and other above-water locations on Malta.
But there were some differences.
Firstly, these ruts were a good bit wider and deeper than the ruts at Clapham Junction. It was possible to get my whole body down horizontally into most of them and to swim along inside them for distances of 20 metres or so before reaching a break.
Secondly, although most ran in parallel pairs as though left by cart-wheels, exactly as at Clapham Junction, there were indeed several single ‘channels’ even wider and deeper than the others.
Thirdly, in places where I managed to strip away the thick sea-grass covering the bottom of a rut I came across an extremely odd feature. About twice as wide at the base as the average ruts at Clapham Junction, these proved everywhere I searched to be divided into two ‘lanes’ by a knife-edged ridge of limestone about a hand’s-breadth high that had been left in place running the full length of the rut. In my view there can be no question of this being a natural feature. It is definitely man-made.
Fourthly, the top of the ruts at Clapham Junction lie flush with the bedrock. Here underwater, although the interior of the ruts had been cut down into the bedrock in the same way, the sides of the ruts also rose about 30 centimetres above the level of the surrounding bedrock – like low, narrow parallel walls.
As at Clapham Junction all these features appeared to have been hewn out of the solid bedrock by tools, and not to have been worn down by centuries or millennia of abrasion.
As at Clapham Junction I also found one place where a pair of ruts was interrupted by what almost seemed like a roadway running transverse to them. The ruts stopped completely on one side of the ‘roadway’, which had been cut through them and thus obliterated them at this point, and then resumed their course on the other. The obvious implications of this state of affairs were that the transverse road had been made after the ruts and that the ruts may therefore have already been ancient when they were submerged.
As at Clapham Junction these ruts didn’t seem to be coming from anywhere in particular or going to anywhere in particular. Some of them did lead in general towards the edge of the drop-off but vanished completely into the sea-grass before reaching it.
Canal
Qawra Point, 22 June 2001, dive 3
Diving and filming are both activities that require a lot of time, preparation and messing around with equipment, so it was nearly three in the afternoon before we were finished at Marfa Point and after four when we reached Qawra Point on the other side of the island.
Chris Agius put on his scuba gear while we were anchoring and jumped in to relocate and mark the site before we went down to it. And since this was one of those very rare days in Malta when everything went right he was back up within five minutes waving success.
We descended to a flat, rocky bottom at a depth of about 18 metres and, though it was overgrown as usual with thick sea-grass, I could see the level plain extend to the limits of visibility on all sides of me. It seemed completely natural. But moments later Chris brought us to a clear, clean gap in the sea-grass caused by a channel – perhaps something more like a canal really – that ran straight for tens of metres through the bedrock. A little over 2 metres deep and about the same wide, its floor consisted of pure, white, level sand.
But how thick was the sand? I pushed my gloved hand experimentally down into it until had it had disappeared beyond my wrist. It was deeper than that, possibly a lot deeper. But it would take airlift equipment to find out for sure.
The walls of the canal were cut down vertically into the bedrock on each side and did, very strongly, give the impression of being artificially formed.
Chris and I swam along the bottom of the canal side by side – there was room to do that – for 20 or 30 metres until we came to the place he wanted to show me. Here the canal was spanned by a ‘bridge’ flat on top and level with the surrounding plain. It too was a rock-hewn feature – a narrow section of the original bedrock that had simply been left in place when the canal was formed, and then hollowed out underneath into an archway through which the contents of the canal could flow.
We swam under the arch several times and Chris pointed out how the vertical side walls bore what looked like tool marks. I agreed with him. And again I found myself looking
at something underwater that could not easily be explained as natural. For whereas arches, sometimes on a very grand scale, are found beneath the sea, they almost always prove to be part of collapsed cave systems. That was not the case here, for we were in open underwater country – that would have been open country before its submergence – and because this arch crossed a dead-straight 2 metre deep channel that was completely out of character with everything else that nature had succeeded in doing in the vicinity.
Last but not least, the canal proved to run due north-south – an orientation significant to humans but not to nature.
The missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle
Anton Mifsud cites the underwater channels around Malta as further evidence for his thesis that this was ‘Plato’s island’, since canals or channels also feature prominently in Plato’s description of Atlantis.
Mifsud’s proposal, as we’ve seen, is that the world-famous story of the destruction of Atlantis in a ‘single dreadful day and a night’ that Plato recounted at the beginning of the fourth century BC is an echo, or folk memory, of massive destruction wrought on Malta in 2200 BC by a fault collapse along the submarine Pantalleria Rift. He notes that Malta today has a pronounced ‘wedge-like’ tilt from south-west (the thick end of the wedge, e.g., the towering coastal cliffs at Dingli and Maghlaq) to the north-east (where the thin end of the wedge disappears under the sea, as at Sliema). This tilt has come about because Malta lies very close to the tectonic collision front between the African and Eurasian continental plates:25