Hagar Qim is the higher and northernmost of the twin temples. Occupying a flattened promontory of glaring white limestone, it is thought to have been built between 3500 and 3300 BC.35 As with other surviving sacred architecture of archaic Malta, it seems to abhor straight lines, seducing the eye with patterns of curves and waves. Its flowing perimeter, flung out in a great irregular ellipse, is defined by a picket of enormous upright megaliths, deeply gnarled and weathered, some laid side-on, some face-on, some broken, some missing, some restored. What seems like its primary entrance, framed by an imposing trilithion, is on the south-eastern side of the structure in a gently concave section of wall made of large, finely fitted blocks. On the north side, to the east of a second trilithion, a narrow, tapering monolith, like a chimney or an obelisk, towers 7 metres tall; in the very top of it, only visible from a helicopter or a crane, is a carved basin, function unknown.
Inside the temple there are the usual clusters of lobed, egg-shaped rooms arranged in pairs – but I will not describe these further here other than to refer the reader to the relevant plans and photographs. With the notable exception of their astronomical and solar alignments, which were deliberately and precisely hard-wired into the architecture and from which certain deductions may legitimately be made, all ideas of function that have been proposed for them, and for the rooms of Malta’s other temples, are entirely speculative. For example, we might say that this feature here is an ‘altar’, that that feature in the wall over there is an ‘oracle hole’, while this one in the floor at our feet is a ‘libation hole’; that here the priests met in convocation; that there public gatherings were held … and so on and so forth. But it would all be guesswork, fantasy, invention. Since we don’t have the texts of the temple builders, the truth is that we don’t know why they built the temples, or why they built them with megaliths (rather than smaller, more manageable stones), or how these structures were used, or even if they were ‘temples’ at all in anything like the traditional meaning of the word.
Hagar Qim offers several alignments on the summer solstice. One, at dawn, is on the north-east side of the structure, where the sun’s rays, passing through the so-called oracle hole, project the image of a disk, roughly the same size as the perceived disk of the moon, on to a stone slab on the gateway of the apse within. As the minutes pass the disk becomes a crescent, then elongates into an ellipse, then elongates still further and finally sinks out of sight as though into the ground. A second alignment occurs at sunset, on the north-west side of the temple, when the sun falls into a V-shaped notch on a distant ridge in line with a foresight on the temple perimeter.
I suspect in some way connected with astronomy is an object, unknown from any other site in Malta, in Hagar Qim’s south-western apse. Described as ‘a mysterious column altar’,36 it is a smoothly hewn white limestone pillar, almost circular in cross-section, with a circumference of about I metre and a height of 1.5 metres. The pillar stands upright within the curve at the south-western end of the apse – which has been identified as an ‘inner sanctum’37 – so it seems to have been accorded a special significance.
Were such an object to be found amidst the ruins of a south Indian temple it would instantly be recognized as an ancient Sivalingam, the symbol and the manifestation of the god of knowledge, measurement and astronomy. But India is among the few places in the world where a culture of vast antiquity is still alive today. In Malta the thread connecting the present to the past is broken and the voices and ideas of the temple-builders have not been heard for millennia …
Floorplan of Mnajdra. Based on Evans (1971).
Below the promontory on which Hagar Qim stands, the land falls away steeply in a south-westerly direction towards Mnajdra and the sea. It is rough land, heavily overgrown by wild thyme in the summer, with knolls and ridges of bedrock poking everywhere through the thin topsoil. These days, however, the walk down takes less than ten minutes on a concrete footpath installed by the Museums Department – which is in overall charge of the two sites.
Mnajdra is not one temple but a complex of three. Of these the easternmost, with three delicate apses disposed as a clover leaf, is the smallest and is believed to be the oldest – about 3600 BC, the same period as Gigantija. Archaeologists think that the westernmost, ‘lower’ temple was built next, around 3400 BC. Finally, at around 3200 BC, the middle – or ‘upper’ – temple was squashed in between its elder predecessors.38
All are megalithic and all demonstrate a very high degree of architectural, engineering and mathematical competence on the part of the builders, but the lower temple is particularly imposing, with several courses of cyclopean masonry still intact on top of enormous dressed boulders at ground level. It was described in 1993 as the ‘best preserved of all the Maltese temples’.39 How long it can remain so is open to question, since the Museums Department’s custody of the site has not yet run to the provision of full-time night-watchmen. In consequence, in 1996 and again in April 2001, Mnajdra was severely vandalized – at night – by well-organized gangs of men armed with spray paint and sledgehammers. It beggars belief that this could have been allowed to happen – even once – on an archaeological site of acknowledged global importance that is more than 5000 years old. But for it to have happened twice?
In such ways, either by accident or by design, Malta rends and devours her own past.
This cannibal feast shows no sign of coming to an end, and, although the megalithic temples are strong and massive none of them can last for ever. As noted in chapter 15, the archaeologist David Trump recognizes twenty-three groups of ruins in the Maltese archipelago as ‘classifiable temples’. But he also comments on the existence of at least twenty further ‘scatters of megalithic blocks … which could represent the last vestiges of former temples’ and accepts that we can never know how many there may once have been.40
So if the raw materials that the archaeologists have to work with in order to understand and date the temple-building culture have been so radically reduced-reduced almost by half from forty-three to just twenty-three sites (not to mention other sites that may have disappeared completely with the passage of time, or await discovery underwater) – then how can we be sure that their interpretation of Maltese prehistory is correct? And if it is difficult enough to explain how twenty-three megalithic temples appear with no architectural antecedents at the dawn of history, on tiny arid islands that had only been inhabited for 1600 years, then how much harder it is to account for forty-three of them.
Perhaps the answer lies in the Palaeolithic.
How to tell your Palaeolithic from your Neolithic
Palaeolithic is one of those supposedly exact ‘scientific’ terms in anthropology and archaeology that promotes inexact thought. Meaning ‘Old Stone Age’, it is defined – arbitrarily – as having come to an end 12,000 years ago, and to have been followed by the Neolithic, ‘New Stone Age’, from 12,000 years ago (10,000 BC) onwards. After about 7000 years of Neolithic culture, the metal ‘ages’ of copper (roughly third millennium BC), bronze (roughly second millennium BC), and iron (roughly first millennium BC) then followed.
In summary, the term Palaeolithic is generally applied to all human remains and activities prior to 12,000 years ago while the term Neolithic is generally applied to all human remains and activities between roughly 12,000 years ago and 5000 years ago. However, on closer examination it turns out that the definitions are not purely chronological – since it is possible to find certain isolated societies that may be said to be at a ‘Palaeolithic’ or more often ‘Neolithic’ stage of development even today.41
Thus, as well as referring, somewhat vaguely, to periods of prehistory, ‘Palaeolithic’ and ‘Neolithic’ are also terms that say something about the lifestyles of the people to whom they are applied. Typically, archaeologists focus on the types of stone tools used at a newly discovered Stone Age site (its ‘lithic assembly’), on its art, on any evidence concerning its inhabitants’ means of sustenance, and of course on any
materials that can be dated by radiocarbon or other techniques, to get a first sense of how it should be classified.
Since we are dealing with the Stone Age here, study of the lithic assemblages is a definitive exercise. Archaeologists skilled in this field are often able at a glance to assign stone tools not only to the Palaeolithic or the Neolithic, but also to sub-categories of those broad divisions. Moreover, it is generally true to say that flints, scrapers, axe-heads, arrowheads and spear-points from the Neolithic end of the Stone Age spectrum are smaller, more delicate, more refined, better made and more skilfully worked than their counterparts from the Palaeolithic.
Although this fits comfortably with modern notions of progress and natural selection (i.e., the glorious and unbroken ascent of Man, via ever finer technology, from a ‘primitive’ to a sophisticated creature), other evidence suggests that the arrival of the Neolithic entailed a cultural Fall. Look at the extraordinary art that Palaeolithic humans left behind, much of it painted or engraved on the walls of inaccessible European caves between roughly 30,000 and 12,000 years ago. Nothing so beautiful, so technically accomplished, or so ‘sophisticated’ was ever attempted again by any known culture until the time of the Renaissance -and Picasso is said to have commented on emerging from Lascaux: ‘We have invented nothing.’42 Yet Palaeolithic art is Palaeolithic art. It did not survive into the Neolithic.
Another indicator is the presence of pottery – with the general rule being none in the Palaeolithic and a gradual introduction during the Neolithic. However, the absence of pottery does not necessarily mean that a site automatically belongs to the Palaeolithic. Many Neolithic cultures passed through a preceramic phase, such as the first inhabitants of Mehrgarh in Pakistan, for example (Level 1A), and the first two habitation layers at Jericho (pre-pottery Neolithic A and pre-pottery Neolithic B).43
Archaeologists also look at how the inhabitants of a Stone Age site got their living – because here they identify another important difference between the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic. In the Palaeolithic, though they sometimes lived in fixed communities, our ancestors are thought to have been hunter-gatherers with no agriculture or systematic food production of any kind. In the Neolithic, on the other hand, indeed at the very beginning of the Neolithic, agriculture was ‘invented’ (apparently independently at several locations) and food-production rapidly became the engine of expanding human culture.
But here any precise system of definitions or chronology begins to break down. As some of the new research reviewed in earlier chapters suggests, there is not a clean ‘start-line’ in the agricultural story 12,000 years ago at the arbitrary ‘beginning’ of the Neolithic. Agriculture does not seem to have taken root in some areas until thousands of years later, well inside the ‘Neolithic’ in chronological terms.
None of these qualifications are supposed to matter very much in Malta, where the Palaeolithic is treated by archaeologists as simply irrelevant to the human story.44 As we’ve seen, the orthodox view holds that the Maltese islands were not inhabited by humans until 7200 years ago, a Neolithic date, and that the very first people were indeed Neolithic farmers – immigrants from Sicily -with a typical Neolithic ‘tool-kit’ and Neolithic pottery, etc. So when Anton Mifsud proves (as Anthony Frendo of the University of Malta conceded in 1999)45 that humans were after all present on Malta in the Palaeolithic, and has even gone so far as to suggest a possible Palaeolithic origin for such complex ‘Neolithic’ structures as the megalithic temples and the Hypogeum, it should be obvious that he is stepping very far out of line.
‘Regarding the antiquity of the Hypogeum,’ Mifsud e-mailed me on 15 July 2001 after I had asked him to reconfirm his position, ‘my gut feeling is that there is strong evidence to show that it had originated in its function subserving the ancient Maltese in the Palaeolithic …’46
What is that evidence?
The strange case of the bison-bull (1)
In David Trump’s authoritative Archaeological Guide to Malta, most recently updated and extended in March 2000, the visitor to the Hypogeum is urged to:
Pause to look at the wall opposite the stairs down to the lower storey. Dark lines of black paint outline what is apparently intended to be a bull. It is crudely done, and the head and shoulders have not survived. That it is ancient and intentional is shown by the fact that the ochre wash on the wall ceases exactly at the black line.47
There is an amazing allegation explaining why the head and shoulders of the Hypogeum bull have ‘not survived’ – and why most of the rest of its body has now also faded to a ghostly shadow that few visitors will be able to make out at all. The reason, reports Mifsud, is that ‘The bison-bull at the Hypogeum was removed at the express directive of the Director of Museums.’48
What Trump calls simply a ‘bull’ Mifsud described as a ‘bison-bull’ (an extinct species) for very specific anatomical reasons:
Besides the multitude of drawings in red ochre at the Hypogeum, there are also drawings in black manganese dioxide pigment, and one of these measures 1.15 by 0.95 metres. It represents a bovid, the Pleistocene European bison-bull, ‘with a hunch on its back, with short horns and tail’ [Megary, T., 1995, Society in Prehistory, page 261] and is situated on the left wall at the entrance of the Holy of Holies … The red ochre wash on the same wall is a later feature for it terminates just short of the figure. The red wash itself is a recognized feature of early Upper Palaeolithic cultures; [for example] at Tito Bustillo [northern Spain], red wash covers the entire surface of the walls, and this has been dated to the Magdalenian [15,000 to 10,000 BC] Paintings in black were dominant in earlier forms of cave art and considering the simple crude design of this Hypogeum bovid, together with its frozen aspect, the lack of perspective and infill, and the non-differentiation between foreground and background, its dating in the Upper Palaeolithic is therefore estimated to be very early on in the pre-Magdalenian period.
Together with the horse, the bison was a dominating theme in European Palaeolithic art. Regular bulls also feature significantly in the same culture, with entire halls of bulls being represented such as at the classical Palaeolithic site of Lascaux, which is dated to the early Magdalenian.49
If there is any possibility that Mifsud could be right about the Palaeolithic identity of the Hypogeum ‘bison-bull’ then the alleged act of scrubbing it off the wall represents not just a desecration of the integrity of an ancient archaeological site but something more sinister. The result was the destruction of scarce physical evidence which potentially contradicts teachings about Malta’s prehistory that are at the heart of the orthodox world view – i.e., that Malta was not inhabited by humans during the Palaeolithic, that it remained in this condition until 5200 BC, when it was settled by a Neolithic people from Sicily, and that the Hypogeum is, therefore, a Neolithic structure, wholly a Neolithic structure, and nothing but a Neolithic structure …
The strange case of the bison-bull (2)
Anton Mifsud’s extremely serious charge – effectively of official vandalism against what is now a UNESCO World Heritage site – was first put on public record in Dossier Malta in 1997. I was unable to find any official rebuttal of it or even a comment upon it from the appropriate authorities and when I contacted Mifsud in July 2001 to confirm that he still stood by the story, he replied that he did, 100 per cent. But, I asked, what possible motive could F. S. Mallia, the Director of Museums at the time, have had for issuing such an extraordinary order?
The motive, suggested Mifsud, was just plain stubbornness. It was well known that in the 1960s David Trump had believed the then recently discovered bull figure to be of archaeological significance. And it was well known that Mallia, a pupil of J. D. Evans who was at that time being trained to take over Trump’s position, had disagreed. Much later, when Mallia was in authority at the Museum, he decided upon a final solution to the vexatious matter of the bull: ‘Mallia ordered one of the employees to scrub the representation of the wall, and he thus imagined that he had settled th
e issue once and for all.’50
The strange case of the bison-bull (3)
I felt that it would be wrong to leave an allegation as grave as this unresolved and on 17 July 2001, and again on 12 November 2001, I sent the following e-mail to Dr Anthony Pace, Malta’s current Director of Museums:
Dear Dr Pace,
Thank you for your department’s cooperation during my recent visit with the Diverse Productions film crew to shoot the Malta segment of a three-hour television series (Underworld) that we are making for Britain’s Channel 4 about the origins of civilization. I am the writer and presenter of this series. I am also writing a book of the same title, to be published by Penguin. Both book and television series are scheduled to come out at the same time early in 2002.
In connection with these projects and in the interests of ensuring that what I write is accurate and fair, I would be grateful if you would e-mail me by return with your official on-the-record comments on the following – potentially rather grave – issues concerning the Museum:
In their 1997 book Dossier Malta, Anton and Simon Mifsud speak of a ‘bison-bull’ figure in the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum (Trump describes it simply as a ‘bull’ and notes that ‘the head and shoulders have not survived’). The figure is or was painted in black manganese dioxide pigment on the wall opposite the stairs down to the lower level of the Hypogeum (Trump, Archaeological Guide, 72), but Mifsud and Mifsud state on page 168 of Dossier Malta that ‘THE BISON-BULL AT THE HYPOGEUM WAS REMOVED AT THE EXPRESS DIRECTIVE OF THE DIRECTOR OF MUSEUMS’:
Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization Page 50