Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

by Graham Hancock

  ‘Great interest amongst foreign archaeologists …’

  The website also reprinted and translated a number of articles about the discovery that had recently appeared in the press. I’d put these on to my laptop as well and now scrolled through them to see if they had anything to add.

  From II Mument (Maltese national newspaper), 31 October 1999:

  Recently, structures that resemble megalithic temples have been discovered on the sea-bed in Maltese waters. These are currently being studied to establish whether they are actually unique megalithic temples.

  This discovery has been considered to be of great archaeological importance, and has raised great interest amongst foreign archaeologists …

  The discovery was made on the 13th of July 1999 at 10 a.m. and was photographed. The diver/cameraman who filmed the structures was Shaun Arrigo, while the photographer who took the photos was his brother Kurt …

  So two Maltese diver-photographers, the brothers Shaun and Kurt Arrigo, had been involved with Zeitlmair in the discovery – and had in fact taken the blurry photographs that I had seen on the web.

  I would need to contact them.

  ‘The age for the megalithic temples must be changed …’

  What next? I scrolled quickly through another article in the file. It had appeared in the periodical Maltamag and contained an interview with Zeitlmair. But in the preamble written by reporter Daniel Mercieca, my eyes were drawn to this paragraph:

  During a meeting with Joseph S. Ellul, a Maltese who has dedicated his life to the study of prehistoric constructions, Dr Zeitlmair was shown a 1933 photo taken by the Royal Navy. This picture seemingly showed a megalithic construction below the surface. Ellul confided to Dr Zeitlmair that he had proposed to the local authorities concerned to start research on site. Unfortunately, his suggestion was never taken up, his numerous letters being left unanswered.

  In the interview Zeitlmair commented:

  Following my meetings with Joseph S. Ellul I strengthened my determination and contacted various people about the subject. This led to the formation of a team all set towards one goal – uncovering a temple under sea water. After several futile attempts at locating the site, success came on July 13th, 1999 at 10 a.m. Where exactly is the site of the discovery!

  It is located some mile and half off the Sliema coast … Incidentally, when I first came to the islands, I was residing at the Diplomat Hotel in Sliema, where I occupied a room with a superb sea-view. Now that the temples have been located, I realize that the answer was lying under my nose for so long!

  What accounts for the site being underwater?

  Though further investigations have to be made, the Ice Age is most likely the correct answer to this. The last Ice Age ended around 13,000 years ago. Hopefully studies will prove that the ‘temples’ date back to that period.

  Could these findings change Malta’s history as we know it!

  Most certainly – and not only Malta’s! The age for the megalithic temples must be changed to 12,000 or 13,000 years ago. And the same applies to all the artifacts recovered from those periods. Malta may indeed prove that the earth’s history as we know it must be changed.

  Now I had a new name – Joseph Ellul – to add to the list of contacts who I would need to chase down in Malta, and new doubts about the exact provenance of whatever it was that had been discovered underwater off Sliema. For if the press reports were correct, then: (a) Zeitlmair had not shot the original video footage and photographs of the site (these were the work of Maltese divers Shaun and Kurt Arrigo); (b) Zeitlmair had got the idea for the location of the site from a Maltese prehistorian named Joseph Ellul; and (c) Joseph Ellul was in possession of an aerial photograph of the north-east coast of Malta that actually showed the location of the site about a mile and a half off Sliema …

  ‘Confused …’

  The last article in my file was a sarcastic piece by Mark Rose in Archaeology, the journal of the Archaeological Institute of America. Entitled ‘The Truth, And Some Other Stuff, is Out There’ it made heavy weather of Zeitlmair’s ancient-astronaut enthusiasms and pointed out that:

  Chronology appears to be somewhat confused in Zeitlmair’s interpretation. According to the website, he sees links between the submerged ‘temple’ and both Noah’s Flood and the rise in sea-level following the end of the Ice Age. Furthermore, the presence of deeper sand deposits on the west side of the ‘ruins’, the side toward Gibraltar, than on the east side is taken as an indication that the flooding of the Mediterranean by Atlantic waters (which really did occur) was involved in the inundation of the ‘temple’. The Mediterranean flooding, however, took place some five million years ago.

  The Maltese Museum Department’s archaeology curator Reuben Grima has visited the site, and was unconvinced that the stones on the seafloor are indeed a temple, according to archaeologist Anthony Bonanno of the University of Malta. Bonanno himself is skeptical of the find, noting that even if there is a submerged structure it does not mean the temples need to be re-dated.3

  Two more names for my list: Reuben Grima and Anthony Bonanno.

  The complete list now included Shaun Arrigo, Kurt Arrigo, Joseph Ellul, Reuben Grima, Anthony Bonanno. And, of course, Hubert Zeitlmair – whom Santha and I had arranged to meet in the coffee lounge of the Diplomat Hotel in Sliema soon after our arrival.

  Our plane was coming in over Malta now, gear down, ready to land. The island blazed white with reflected light from its limestone outcrops and cliffs. The sky was clear. The surrounding sea was deep blue and flat calm. Despite warnings that November is an unpredictable month in this part of the Mediterranean, I had every reason to hope that we might be able to dive the next morning and settle the matter of the underwater temple once and for all by thoroughly exploring and photographing it.

  But it wasn’t going to be quite as easy or as straightforward as that.

  Bird’s-eye view … (1)

  Malta, 24 June 2001

  I’m on board a helicopter – an old Soviet Mi8 with masses of room inside for troops and great visibility out of the open door and rear window. It’s been converted for commercial use and I know for a fact that it served for several years as an air taxi in Bulgaria before ending up in Malta. Normally it flies passengers between Malta and Gozo but this afternoon, thanks to Channel 4, we have the exclusive charter of it for an hour.

  We take off from Luqa airport, hop straight up into the air 50 metres, circle widely, then head north-east across the township of Paola that separates two of Malta’s extraordinary prehistoric monuments – the Hypogeum of Hal Saflieni (fully carved out of the living rock underground and thus not visible from the air) and the majestic Tarxien temple complex with its apsidal (‘kidney-shaped’) rooms, graceful spirals carved in relief, looming ‘mother-goddess’ figures and gigantic megaliths.

  Archaeological consensus dates Tarxien to between 3100 and 2500 BC while the Hypogeum is thought to be a few hundred years older – with parts of it perhaps going back as far as 3600 BC.4 Such a range of dates ranks these structures amongst the very oldest examples of monumental architecture yet to have been discovered anywhere on earth.

  And the problem is that they are clearly not the work of beginners. The megaliths, some weighing 20 tonnes, perfectly balanced and integrated with one another in complex walls and passages, are hewn from the hard coralline and globigerina limestone with which Malta is plentifully endowed and which to this day affords the inhabitants their primary source of building materials. But now it is sawn up into manageable blocks weighing only a few kilos and barely half a metre in length.

  We continue north-east across Grand Harbour to hover at 200 metres above the fairytale city of Valletta. It is much younger than the temples, belonging in every sense to a different epoch of the earth, with most of its labyrinth of narrow alleyways and shadowed courtyards dating from the sixteenth century AD or later. Yet Grand Harbour, now gleaming with gantry cranes unloading great container ships, was once itself the sit
e of a megalithic temple – the remains of which are believed to lie underwater, buried in deep silt and rubble, at the foot of Fort Saint Angelo.5 According to an eye-witness report by Jean Quintinus, this prehistoric temple extended over ‘a large part of the harbour, even far out into the sea’ as late as AD 1536. In 1606 Megeiser could still see enough to note that it was constructed of ‘rectangular blocks of unbelievable sizes’. And even in the nineteenth century visitors reported ‘stones five to six feet long and laid without mortar’.6

  That nothing is left of the temple today does not surprise me. Since my first research visit to Malta in November 1999 I’ve learned that objects – and even places – of archaeological importance can and do disappear here in mysterious ways. For example, ancient remains of an estimated 7000 people were found in the Hypogeum of Hal Saflieni, buried in a matrix of red earth, when it was excavated by Sir Themistocles Zammit at the beginning of the twentieth century.7 Today only six skulls are left, stashed out of public view in two plastic crates in the cavernous vaults of Malta’s National Museum of Archaeology. Nobody has the faintest idea what has happened to all the rest of the bones. They’ve just ‘vanished’, according to officials at the Museum.8

  And the six skulls? After much pressure and protest I have been allowed to see them only this morning and they are – I must confess – extremely and unsettlingly odd. They are weirdly elongated – dolichocephalic is the technical term but this is dolichocephalism of the most extreme form. And one of the skulls, though that of an adult, is entirely lacking in the fossa median – the clearly-visible ‘join’ that runs along the top of the head where two plates of bone are separated in infancy (thus facilitating the process of birth) but later join together in adulthood. I should be paying attention to the fantastic views and seascapes unfolding beneath the helicopter but I keep on wondering: what would people with skulls like that have looked like during life? How could they have survived birth and grown to adulthood? And did the other skulls from the Hypogeum – the lost skulls, the lost bones – also show the same distinctive peculiarity?

  Still at 200 metres, the helicopter is now flying north-west from Valletta to Sliema, following the contours of the coast, taking me over waters that I’ve dived in many times since November 1999 following the trail of Hubert Zeitlmair’s elusive temple …

  Hubertworld … (1)

  Malta, 8 November 1999

  Zeitlmair met us, as we had arranged, in the coffee lounge of the Diplomat Hotel in Sliema. He proved to be a tall, rather dashing man in his mid-forties with long, well-groomed, salt-and-pepper hair, stylish clothes, a soldierly bearing and an impressive moustache. Within a few minutes it had also become obvious that he was severely sight-impaired, if not entirely blind, and he explained, without rancour, that this was the result of a viral infection of the eyes that he had suffered during a period of military service.

  I ventured that his disability must have made diving very difficult – when he was searching for the underwater temple. But he shrugged off my concerns. ‘Of course,’ he explained, ‘I didn’t dive myself. I wouldn’t have been able to see a thing. I guided the divers to the site and they went down to take the photographs and get the evidence.’

  ‘You mean Shaun and Kurt Arrigo?’

  ‘Yes,’ Zeitlmair exclaimed in the manner of a man suppressing a sneeze, ‘the Arrigos.’

  Until that moment I thought I had come to Malta to dive with Hubert Zeitlmair, the discoverer of the submerged temple off the Sliema coast. Indeed, we had discussed the matter by telephone and he had confirmed that a boat and tanks for up to four dives had been arranged for the following day for that specific purpose. The fact that Zeitlmair himself turned out to be a blind non-diver did not necessarily jeopardize those arrangements, of course. Nevertheless, I thought it was time for some clarification.

  ‘So well be diving with Shaun and Kurt Arrigo tomorrow?’ I asked. ‘They’re the ones who know the location?’

  ‘I know the location,’ asserted Zeitlmair into his cappuccino. ‘It was I who led the Arrigos to it in the first place …’

  ‘No offence,’ – I had to ask – ‘but how did you do that? I mean, since your eyesight is so poor, how did you manage to lead them there?’

  At this point Zeitlmair conjured from his briefcase a magnifying glass and a large black-and-white aerial photograph of the coast of Malta between Valletta and Sliema. As he rolled the photograph out on the table between us he said, ‘I was able to lead them to the site because of the indications … here.’ Squinting his eye to the glass and lowering his head he eventually found what looked to me like a pattern of white dots on the photograph in an area of open sea north-east of Sliema. ‘This is the site of the temple,’ he announced. ‘The photograph was taken by the British Royal Navy some time before World War II. The sky and sea were exceptionally clear, and the site became visible to the camera through the water …’

  Well … Maybe. Or maybe it was just light reflecting off dust on the lens.

  ‘Is this the photograph you got from Joseph Ellul?’ I asked

  ‘Yes, from Ellul. That’s right.’

  We then entered into a long, rambling, muddled discussion about who had discovered what. I was on autopilot through most of this, but the gist of it was Zeitlmair’s claim to have developed a theory concerning the locations of Maltese megalithic sites which predicted the presence of a structure underwater off Sliema. The theory had to do with the well-known ‘pairing’ of temples in Malta, one on high ground and the other in the valley below it (as is the case at Skorba and Mgarr, for example, or at Hagar Qim and Mnajdra).9 To this day I cannot understand which temple exactly Zeitlmair has in mind for the high ground around Sliema, and I am not clear whether his theory takes into account the ancient traditions of a megalithic temple in Grand Harbour. Still, what he’s getting at is completely obvious: when sea-level was lower 12,000 or 15,000 years ago, the reefs around Malta, now submerged to depths of 100 metres or so, would all have been above water and the pleasantly sloping valley below Sliema might have seemed an ideal spot in which to build a temple.

  As Zeitlmair told it, he was already geared up to fund a diving expedition off Sliema in order to test this theory; indeed, had bought a flat in Sliema to use as a base for the expedition, when his providential meeting with Joseph Ellul occurred. Ellul showed him the Royal Navy photograph which, he was convinced, pinpointed the exact place off Sliema in which the expedition should dive – roughly 2.5 kilometres from land along a bearing 65 degrees north-east off Saint George’s Tower.10

  ‘Although the location is quite far from shore,’ Zeitlmair continued, ‘where the water is generally more than 40 metres deep, I reasoned that there must be some sort of reef or shallows there to show up so clearly on the photograph -maybe a little sea-mount, or something like that, a high point standing above the surrounding valley, just the sort of place the temple builders would have appreciated … Then I hired the Arrigos to get me to the site in their boat and to search the bottom with an echo-sounder. I figured if the echo-sounder suddenly started giving shallow readings in an area of generally deep water, and if we were about 2.5 or 3 kilometres from shore, then we would have found the right place.’

  I frowned: ‘But why did you need the echosounder? Surely a shallow spot like that would show up on nautical charts? If it’s charted you should be able to set a course straight to it. No need to search.’

  Zeitlmair shrugged: ‘It is not charted … But still it is there. You will see tomorrow.’

  Bird’s-eye view … (2)

  Malta, 24 June 2001

  The helicopter is at 200 metres, flying north-west from Valletta to Sliema about 1 kilometre from shore. To our right is the open ocean – and somewhere out there the ‘sea-mount’ that shows up as a glimmer of pale dots on the Navy photograph. Was it ever a real place? Or just a trick of the light?

  Despite the bad start that I undoubtedly made with Zeitlmair and the Arrigos in November 1999, my confidence has been gro
wing for more than a year now that there could, after all, be something solid behind all the rumours of an underwater temple off Sliema …

  The case of Commander Scicluna

  Malta, 15 June 2000

  Joseph Ellul looks as old and as sturdy as a megalith, and his house in the sunlit village of Zurrieq is named after the nearby temple at Hagar Qim – to the study of which he has devoted most of his life. He speaks loudly, has certain eccentric mannerisms, and once launched on the subject of Malta’s prehistory increases enormously in size and becomes unstoppable.

  Ellul’s particular theory – based in some obscure way that I do not understand on the differential weathering-rates of coralline and globigerina limestone – is that the megalithic temples of his native islands were originally built more than 12,000 years ago by a prehistoric civilization, and were much later destroyed by the biblical deluge (which, he reckons, took place 5000 years ago]. Ellul sets out this theory in his 1988 book Malta’s Prediluvian Culture at the Stone Age Temples – a book that has been entirely overlooked by archaeologists because of its cranky Creationist approach and unfortunate emphasis on an impossible mechanism for the deluge. This mechanism, in Ellul’s opinion, was a cataclysmic penetration of the Straits of Gibraltar by the Atlantic Ocean 5000 years ago, resulting in instant flooding, from the west, of the previously dry Mediterranean basin. Such a penetration (as Michael Rose points out in the journal of the Archaeological Institute of America cited earlier) did indeed occur – 5 million years before Ellul suggests.