Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

by Graham Hancock

  The map also shows that Malta had actually become two islands 13,500 years ago – one, to the west, consisting of the present Malta, Comino and Gozo joined into a single mass, and the other, quite small, lying a little to the east. It is notable that other than this eastern islet nothing was left by this stage of the former grandeur of antediluvian Malta except a reduced extension 2 to 5 kilometres wide along the north-eastern coastal strip.

  The end of the Palaeolithic: 10,600 years ago

  By 10,000 years ago the Maltese archipelago was as it is today. The islet to the east had gone, and the extension of the north-east coast had also been fully submerged. It is somewhere on this north-eastern extension, however – the very last part of antediluvian Malta to go beneath the sea – that the rumoured underwater ‘temple’ sighted off Sliema by Commander Scicluna and by the Arrigo brothers must be located. The implication of the inundation maps, therefore, is that this structure was submerged between 13,500 years ago and 10,600 years ago – a date that can probably be pinned down more narrowly to around 11,000 years ago, marking the second of the three episodes of global superfloods outlined in chapter 3.

  I want to re-emphasize here that the inundation maps have no bearing one way or the other on the matter of Anton Mifsud’s proposed extension of Malta to the south-west – which he suggests was submerged by tectonic subsidence as late as 4200 years ago. As noted earlier, the inundation maps cannot account for large unregistered tectonic events in prehistory and such events are probable in south-west Malta because of its proximity to the Pantalleria Rift.

  The evidence that such an event did occur around 2200 BC is strong and may prove to be the final key necessary to unlock the mysterious origins of Maltese civilization.

  20 / The Morning of the World

  Graham Hancock: If we take the dating of a temple like Mnajdra or Hagar Qim, the better-known temples, how many samples of carbon-datable material would this dating be based on?

  Anthony Bonanno: Nothing at all.

  Mnajdra, 20 June 2000

  It is a little after five a.m., and dark, when we park our rented car near Hagar Qim. There are watchmen huddled together, drinking tea. They won’t be on duty during the night of 16 April 2001 when Mnajdra gets trashed by a well-organized assault-squad armed with sledgehammers, but right now they’re working overtime. Their mission is to keep out any peaceful hippies who might want to commune with the solstice at the temples before they open officially at eight – although apparently it’s tomorrow that most of the would-be meditators and pagans are expected to show up.

  Hagar Qim is enclosed by a tall wire-mesh fence, which we now walk around on our way down to Mnajdra. Through the fence the row of big, heavily eroded megaliths on the south-west side of the temple can be seen glowing whitely, like the teeth of an ancient giant disinterred from the earth.

  I love dawn in Malta in midsummer, with the smell of wild thyme on the soft breeze, and the sea, dark in its depths, quicksilver at the surface, stretching away beneath the fading stars. It always feels like … the morning of the world. As though some wonderful experience – I don’t know what – is just about to envelop me and change me for ever.

  The sky is lightening as we walk, and way off-shore to our south I begin to make out the distant shape of Filfla rising out of the sea. I am troubled by vague feelings of guilt about not having arranged to dive the strait between here and the little island because I’m genuinely intrigued by Anton Mifsud’s theory of major land subsidence in this area in 2200 BC. Since my first meeting with him on 16 June I’ve consulted my copy of the British Admiralty Chart for Malta and found that it shows a submerged ridge, the top of which is nowhere deeper than 49 metres, running from the rocks of the Hamrija shallows directly beneath Mnajdra all the way out to Filfla. On either side of the ridge, roughly east and west of it, the bottom drops off steeply to 80, 90 and then 100 metres.

  It would be extremely interesting, though technically demanding, to explore the ridge, especially inside the zone with a radius of 1 kilometre centred on Filfla itself that is enticingly marked ‘Entry Prohibited’ on my chart. If Mifsud is right that a greater landmass collapsed here 4200 years ago, then the shattered remains of man-made structures built in former times along the Filfla-Mnajdra ridge could await discovery at the bottom of the strait. And though they might have been submerged as recently as 2200 BC –as Mifsud’s research suggests – who is to say when such structures might have been built?

  Theoretically, they might have been built thousands of years earlier than Hagar Qim and Mnajdra, might be the true Palaeolithic predecessors of the great temples of the Neolithic era, and might have survived, revered and imitated, down to Mifsud’s date of 2200 BC, when the land on which they stood sank beneath the sea …

  Theoretically, other relics of Malta’s missing megalithic heritage could have been submerged much earlier by the rising seas that followed the Last Glacial Maximum – especially so if they had been built in the north and east during the late Palaeolithic when a land-bridge 90 kilometres in extent connected Sliema to Sicily …

  And theoretically, of course, pigs might fly, lions might lie down with lambs – anything is possible …

  Still, there is the problem of the unexplained origins of Malta’s remarkable temple-building culture and the sequence which requires us to believe that Gigantija, and the oldest parts of Mnajdra, were that culture’s first-ever experiments in free-standing monumental architecture. And there is the problem of the model temples, some fashioned from terracotta, some from stone, excavated from within the temples themselves and now usefully on display in the National Museum in Valletta.1 While some of these beautiful little models faithfully depict temples of exactly the type that have survived to this day, a few others show an entirely different, highly geometric style of megalithic architecture, where the theme is all straight lines and recurrent right-angles.2 Why don’t we find the ruins of the original structures that these other, rectilinear models supposedly represent? Are they just ‘architect’s designs’, dreamed up but never realized, as David Trump asserts?3 Or could they preserve the images of temples that once existed and were swallowed by the sea?

  I’m deep in these thoughts as we approach the entrance to Mnajdra. It’s almost full daylight now, the sun washing the whole sky with a soft, indirect glow, and I can see through the wire-mesh fence that as well as two guards by the gate, there are at least three other people, dwarfed by the ponderous megaliths, already inside the temple precincts. One of them is mounting a video camera on a tripod; one has a clunky garland of SLR cameras slung around his neck; the third is clutching a biro and a spiral-bound notebook.

  I groan inwardly. The solstice effect at Mnajdra is supposedly subtle and beautiful, one of the powerful epiphanies of archaic surveying and astronomy. I want to see it with no distractions – just silence, the temple and the sun – so that it can speak most clearly for itself. Now at the bare minimum I am going to have to be polite to strangers, make small talk and exchange opinions while we wait for the effect to begin.

  I observe out of the corner of my eye that the man with the notebook is walking towards me and obviously intends to introduce himself. Why do human beings have to talk, I find myself wondering. Is it really necessary for us to make these noises?

  ‘It’s Graham Hancock, isn’t it?’ he asks. ‘Remember me? I’m Chris Micallef.’

  Suddenly I recognize him. He’s the nephew of the late Paul Micallef, the Maltese archaeo-astronomer who first undertood that Mnajdra is a solar calendar in stone and began to unlock the ingenious precision of its alignments. I met Chris during the generally disappointing flurry of our previous stay in Malta in November 1999 when he gave me his uncle’s book,4 then lost touch with him afterwards. Far from being a source of unwelcome noise, he’s the very best person I could possibly hope to meet at Mnajdra. His uncle’s book is why I’m here.

  The sea keeps its secrets

  June 2000-June 2001

  After the June 2
000 trip when I witnessed the solstice effect at Mnajdra, exactly a year passed until we were able to get back to Malta again. But, despite the risks, the frustrations and the expense of the previous trips, I remained convinced that the rumours and whispers of submerged structures were worth pursuing.

  Part of this new up-beat mood, as I’ve explained, was my discovery of the late Commander Scicluna’s involvement in the matter and the report that he had published in the Sunday Times of Malta in 1994 of having found a megalithic temple underwater off Sliema at a depth of 25 feet.

  But another part of it came from my growing acquaintance with the work of Anton and Simon Mifsud, Charles Savona Ventura, Chris Agius and others. Their research helped me to realize that although orthodox archaeologists had probably weighed, measured and counted everything Neolithic on Malta, they had done no justice at all to the possibility – no, the certainty – of a human presence here during the Palaeolithic. On the contrary, it seemed that J. D. Evans had gone to great lengths to bury that possibility so deeply that it would never vex his ‘Stentinello First’ hypothesis again. And while he might not have been the villain who actually switched Baldacchino’s molar for a modern taurodont or put a misleading interpretation on the results of the FUN tests carried out in the 1950s and 1960s, these actions signal – at the very least – a ruthless resolve and an indifference to truth on the part of a person or persons highly placed in Maltese and museum circles. In such a murky setting, where I already knew that there had been outrageous tampering with evidence and gerrymandering of records, it seemed to me to be absolutely within the bounds of possibility that much worse could have been done.

  Just suppose, for example – speculation only – that traces of an earlier, pre-Neolithic civilization had been found on Malta during the 1950s. Suppose the evidence was fragmentary, small, but clear. Would the discovery ever have been made public? Somehow I doubted it. Indeed, the net of confusion and misdirection woven over the years concerning the Ghar Dalam taurodont teeth seemed to me to demonstrate that such a discovery would never have been made public at all if it could possibly have been hushed up.

  Still, there remained one place where no evidence could yet have been tampered with and where the ruins of a former civilization, if truly ancient, might have been preserved for thousands of years. That, of course, was under the sea. And that was why it seemed worth keeping an open mind about doing more diving in Malta and paying attention to any sightings by local divers of submerged structures.

  Just a month after our June 2000 trip had ended I received an e-mail from Anton Mifsud telling me of two such sightings.

  The first was from Audrey and Rupert Mifsud – friends of Anton’s but no relation – who own a dive shop called Buddies on Ramla Bay in northern Malta. Leading a dive off nearby Marfa Point on the north-west side of the island, whilst some of their clients were taking souvenir snapshots of each other in an area of interesting underwater scenery, Audrey had swum over a series of parallel ‘canals’, which had immediately caught her attention as being very unusual and distinctive. Returning to the spot on a second dive, she had discovered several more of these canals cut into the limestone sea-bed at a depth of 8 metres. Beyond the canals, but directly below them near the bottom of a drop-off at 25 metres, Rupert had explored an unusual cave and found three large regular steps carved inside it.

  The second discovery, also in northern Malta, had been made by Chris Agius Sultana, an experienced spear fisherman and scuba-diver and one of the co-authors, with Anton, of Echoes of Plato’s Island. Off Qawra Point on the north-east side of Malta Chris too had found an underwater ‘canal’, this time surmounted by what he said looked like a low bridge, at a depth of 20 metres.

  Storm god

  Malta, 18–19 June 2001

  Santha and I arrived in Malta on 18 June 2001 for our third research visit. But this was a filming trip, too, so our time would not be our own after the evening of the 20th, when the Channel 4 crew were scheduled to join us. Our plan was to put in a couple of days of diving before they arrived – the 19th for an advance look at the new sites found by Chris Agius and the Mifsuds in the north, and the 20th for a more targeted search off Sliema at 1 kilometre rather than 3 kilometres from the shore, particularly if Shaun Arrigo could be persuaded to guide us. Because both time and money were running too short to allow the luxury of speculative search diving with no definite prior sightings to follow, I made the decision that on this trip we would not try to pursue the tempting question of what – if anything – might lie at the bottom of the strait between Mnajdra and Filfla.

  There is a god of stormy weather who likes to follow me around. Honestly, I’m coming to believe this. Ask anyone who dives with me regularly. For the entire week before our arrival the seas around Malta had been flat calm, no clouds, not even a breeze – perfect conditions for really successful diving. But soon after our plane touched down on the afternoon of the 18th, a strong wind began to blow in from the north-west. This was the very worst kind of wind that we could possibly face, as Malta’s orientation is approximately north-west to south-east. Nor’westers therefore blow down both sides of the island so that Marfa Point in the north-west, and Qawra Point and Sliema along the north-east coast would all be equally badly affected.

  We hoped that the wind would fade during the night but it strengthened and on the morning of the 19th we sat with Chris Agius in his Land Rover looking at the big breaking waves lashing in over Qawra Point.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Chris protested in obvious disbelief. ‘Until yesterday afternoon the weather was perfect.’

  ‘It’s just my storm god,’ I replied gloomily. ‘He often does this to me.’

  We debated going in anyway, but since I had come close to death tackling a similar shore-dive in similar conditions in Tenerife the year before, I finally decided against it. Whatever was underwater off Qawra Point wasn’t going anywhere and would still be here on the 22nd, our scheduled day of diving with the film crew. Then we’d be using a 50 foot boat to cover both the underwater sites in the north and wouldn’t have to worry about getting smashed to bits against the rocks doing a dodgy entry or exit from shore.

  Around Malta with the Viking

  19–20 June 2001

  The wind continued to blow all day on the 19th and all day on the 20th, boiling up the waves into an angry foam. But at least the sun was still shining, the sky was clear and there wasn’t any rain. So instead of diving we spent the two days driving around Malta with Chris Agius, who is in his mid-thirties with glacial blue eyes and looks like a Viking, and who willingly shared his insights and research with us.

  It turned out that it had been Chris who first took the idea that Malta might be a remnant of Atlantis to Anton Mifsud -and Anton had initially been sceptical. But as he had investigated the matter further, he had gradually been won round to Chris’s point of view – hence, ultimately, their book Echoes of Plato’s Island.

  I’d last read the book thoroughly when Anton had e-mailed the text to me around September 2000, so this was a good opportunity to clarify a few points.

  ‘If I remember correctly, Echoes identifies the Atlantis flood as an event here in Malta caused by land collapse in the south-west around 2200 BC?’

  ‘That’s right. But of course the temple civilization was much older than that.’

  ‘How much older?’ I asked.

  We were sitting in the bar of the Lapsi Waterfront Hotel in Balluta Bay on the evening of the 19th and Chris looked left and right over his shoulder before replying: ‘Maybe twelve thousand years older. It was a civilization of the last Ice Age.’

  ‘But how do you know that?’

  ‘I’ve seen things,’ Chris hinted mysteriously. Then he laughed: ‘But I can’t prove this. Not yet anyway. I’m working on it.’

  On the 20th we spent a couple of hours stumbling around Malta’s biggest concentration of rock-hewn ‘cart-ruts’ nicknamed Clapham Junction. Up to a metre deep, and in some cases almost a metre wide
at the surface – though narrowing towards the base – they are incised into a big outcrop of bedrock sloping gently uphill between Buskett Gardens and the cliffs at Dingli about 5 kilometres west of Hagar Qim and Mnajdra. But unlike the temples that have come down to us from remote antiquity – near many of which impressive groups of ruts have been found – the ruts themselves suggest no obvious function, either ceremonial or utilitarian.

  Some, as we saw in chapter 15, disappear directly into the sea. Others stop abruptly at the edge of cliffs 100 metres above the waves. Others run between two once connected but now separate locations such as Filfla and Mnajdra. The majority, however, are found in tightly packed groups criss-crossing one another as at Clapham Junction. And although it is undoubtedly the case that very large and heavy-wheeled or sledded vehicles would leave parallel ruts looking quite like these if they were to be rolled or dragged through a field of thick mud or clay, it is altogether a different matter to imagine how such tracks – and so many of them – could be impressed into solid rock. And what would the motive have been? What would the motive have been if the ruts had been worn down a pair or two at a time by the runners of wooden sleds (at present a popular orthodox theory)? How long would it have taken, this way, to make all the ruts that scar the island?

  And what would the motive have been if, by some mighty effort, all the ruts had been made at more or less the same time?

  Wailing and screaming from underground …