by Freddy Silva
The historic temple façade, made from small limestone blocks, rests on a course of older megaliths. Palenque.
Thanks to satellite imagery it is now possible to see where the sacbe run into the Gulf of Mexico and continue some thirty feet beneath the present sea level before rejoining land and continuing to the next temple city.18 At the very least this places their construction before 3000 BC, when the last major sea level rise took place.
Or do such anomalies belong to an earlier epoch? Recent discoveries of 358 submerged cave systems covering nine hundred miles near the temple of Tulum reveals humans were present in the Yucatan earlier than accepted. One recovered human skull was covered in deposits from c.7000 BC. Inside this limestone labyrinth world resembling the arteries of a giant, divers found the remains of enormous sloths, proto-elephants, extinct fauna and, more to the point, Maya artefacts, all deep underwater, trapped by rising water levels between 8000-10,000 years ago, creating a time capsule that places the predecessors of the Maya firmly in this region in the era after the flood.19
K’uKuulKaan set the example of ideal conduct that later humans aspired to follow. Here, an initiate reaches such a level and adopts the serpent symbolism associated with this flood god.
10. SUDDENLY SUBMERGED
“Many have called those straits the Entry of the Mediterranean Sea. Near to the sides of this gullet are set two mountains, one each side, as barriers to shut all in, which are Abila for Africa, and Calpe for Europe, the Limits of the Labours of Hercules. For which cause, the inhabitants of those parts call them the Pillars of that God; and they believe that by ditches digged within the Continent, the Ocean, before excluded, was let in; and so the Face of the Earth was changed.” — Pliny 1
The St. Vincent Islands were discovered in 1789 by Europeans at 7º 21’ N 127º 4’ W — roughly between Baja and Tahiti — by Captain Antonio Martinus while sailing from Panama to Macau. An account of the twelve days spent there was written by a missionary aboard the ship, Father Santa Clara, who describes the islands as moderately elevated, about twenty miles in circumference, well wooded and abounding with coconuts. Several small islands lay to the west, with a boat channel in-between providing good harbor. The abundant fur seals on the beach were so tame they would not move out of the way of a landing party searching for food.
Before stocking the ship with five thousand coconuts, two hundred and fifty bread-fruits, four hundred land terrapins and twenty-five green turtles, it was noted how a volcano was ablaze on each of the nine islands. Which might explain why, when Captain Benjamin Morrell sailed there in 1824 all he found after forty-six days of surveillance was discolored water to a depth of 720 feet.2
Geologists generally scorn the idea of landmasses disappearing in the blink of an eye, and yet, much to their vexation, suddenly vanishing landmasses are a regular occurrence, even in historical times. Take the case of a Polynesian sailor living on Tuanaki island, part of the Cook group, in 1842. When a missionary vessel was sent to rescue him two years later, Tuanaki and two other islands had disappeared, the result of a violent earthquake.
Or Davis Island, discovered in 1687, five hundred miles west of South America at 27º south, added to naval charts because it was a huge landmass stretching beyond the horizon. Thirty-five years later captain Jacob Roggeveen went looking for it on his way to Australia but it was no longer above sea level. Still, the journey was not a loss for the Dutchman, for he stumbled upon Easter Island by accident; two islands in the vicinity were put on naval maps as late as 1912 only to vanish in the proceeding years, including Sarah Ann Island in 1932, which failed to be found after a fruitless three-week search by the U.S. Navy.
Chroniclers in the fifth century BC were no strangers to such phenomena. Herodotus noted on his travels that all the land in Egypt south of Menfer and all the way to the highlands of Ethiopia had once been covered by the sea, as were the desert plains of Arabia, corroborating the earlier account from Teotokai Andrew of an island inhabited by the Anunaki having existed in that region during the Younger Dryas.
The historian Pliny likewise was aware of the cutting off of landmasses by rising sea levels, such as Britain from France, and Sicily from Italy. He too referenced a large continent that once was in the middle of the Atlantic, adding, “in our Mediterranean Sea, all men may see at this day how much has been immersed: Acarnania by the inward Gulf of Ambracia; Achaia within that of Corinth... And besides, the Sea has broken through Leucas, Antirrhium, Hellespont, and the two Bosphori.”3 Back in the day the process of geologic renewal was accepted as sudden and catastrophic, such as the total collapse of mountains and hills like Cybotus and Phogium in Ethiopia.4 As recently as 646 AD a violent earthquake in Chile levelled several mountains, while an entire province in China was swallowed up and replaced by a lake in 1556.5 And had you been near the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island in 2016 you would have seen ten feet of sea floor rise out of the ocean following an earthquake that lasted a mere two minutes.
With missing lands comes the prospect of lost civilizations and the two go hand-in-hand. A 1966 oceanographic investigation of the Pacific Ocean discovered "two upright columns, about two feet or more in diameter, sighted extending five feet out of the mud. Two more had fallen down and were partially buried, and another angular square-ish block was seen."6 The official report added that one of the columns bore markings resembling inscriptions. The odd thing was, the worked columns were now at a depth of 6000 feet and fifty-five miles off the coast of Peru.7 During the Younger Dryas that coastline would have seen the sea 600 feet lower than it is today,8 still not enough to explain how five man-made objects found their way to the ocean floor. Or perhaps the Andean flood accounts of mountains rising and falling rapidly are not as far fetched as they sound.
What is certain is that 11,000 years ago an unnamed stone mason living in the Sicilian Channel between Sicily and Tunisia cut a 39-foot long, 15-ton limestone monolith, drilled holes into its surface, and transported it 1000 feet to where it was placed upright. In a part of the world where such menhirs are commonplace, it was surprising to find this particular example at a depth of 131 feet below the Mediterranean Sea. The monolith was dated to c.9300 BC based on attached shell fragments, thus it had to have been carved and transported long before being engulfed by encroaching waters. And there's no mistaking its human origins: it has a regular shape and three drilled holes of similar diameter on a block of non-local limestone.9
Pliny and others, it seems, were absolutely right about the rapid re-shaping of the landscape, particularly the sudden inundation of the Mediterranean.
A MALTESE ENIGMA
Prior to the events of 9700 BC the Mediterranean Sea was much shallower, peppered with archipelagos and landmasses of considerable size that became solitary islands after the drastic rise in sea level at the end of the Younger Dryas, so it is reasonable to ask if we are missing an entire antediluvian megalithic culture whose survivors found themselves scrambling for higher ground. Part of the answer lies in and around the Maltese archipelago, which formed part of Sicily before rising seas transformed it into four islands.
Filfa island seen from the megalithic temple of Hagar Qim. The land bridge connecting it to Malta collapsed in a major catastrophe.
A few years ago I had the opportunity to visit the temples on those sun-kissed islands. Their cloverleaf and womb-shaped internal chambers are unique, as are their adjacent underground temples — hypogea — with whom they form a symbiotic image of the universe, the light above and the dark below. They certainly give the impression of having developed in isolation, the product of a society that wished to remain separate.
One of the oldest temples, Ggantija (Tower of the Giantess), stands on the smaller island of Gozo. It is officially dated to c.3600 BC, based on fragments of debris taken from one of the chambers after the site was cleared during excavations around 1904, casting doubt on the quality of undisturbed organic material. And since the analysis was made long before the availability
of radiocarbon testing, the dating appears to be nothing more than an educated guess, to shoehorn it into the academically acceptable timeframe. In 1934 the archaeologist Luigi Ugolini speculated that the lowest habitation layer of another Maltese temple, Tarxien, was closer to 8000 BC.10 It requires no effort to image how this news was received.
Ggantija’s unusual double axis, one for the Sun, the other for the Moon. Bottom: its lower, older wall is better constructed, and better preserved.
Just like temples in the Andes, Ggantija's oldest stones are also its largest. The original lower courses were cut from hard globigerina limestone and weigh sixty tons apiece and, as one would expect on a small island, they show signs of water erosion. The upper courses are newer, made with smaller, less refined masonry and of a construction aesthetic sufficiently mismatched to suggest a later reconstruction, like an apprentice electrician returning to finish the work of a master carpenter. They are also in a comparatively advanced state of erosion, even the undersides, suggesting they were once scattered on the ground, then reused for reconstruction. The thing is, Malta’s regional climate is arid, and has been progressively so for 8000 years.11
On the main island, the above is repeated at the temple of Hagar Qim. A number of building periods featuring differing skill levels have been at work here. The older the stones, the better the skill, but unlike Ggantija, the lower courses of Hagar Qim show extreme weathering to the point of crumbling, as one would expect from limestone closer to the sea and exposed to the elements for a vast length of time. A second period of construction repaired sections of the original temple using blocks of more manageable size and lacking the same finesse, again adding height to the original walls; insensitive twentieth century restoration has left predictably appalling results.
Once again the condition of the stone becomes the focal point. If the temples are less than six thousand years old, where did the water come from to produce such an advanced level of erosion, because it's been nine thousand years since Malta last experienced the type of sustained precipitation required to create the kind of erosion borne by its temples.
Since the region shares the same climatic footprint as North Africa, it is possible to travel to Giza and observe the same effects on its oldest temples. One of my favorite places to demonstrate the effects of large-scale water erosion is the rectangular temple situated behind the small pyramid credited to Menkaure. In addition to a crowd-free environment, you will be rewarded with a courtyard and avenue composed of massive blocks of limestone, whose upper courses show exactly the same level of water erosion found at Ggantija, Hagar Qim, Mnajdra, and every other Maltese site. A careful examination of this pyramid temple also reveals blocks taken from other sites used to patch and repair, after it too incurred heavy damage from an unknown event. If the Giza Plateau was last exposed to profoundly wet climate between 10,500-8000 BC, it follows that the same climate was responsible for weathering the temples on Malta.
The Maltese temples may be vestiges of a lost antediluvian civilization, given that a number of sites that once stood on dry land now lie two miles offshore and under twenty-five feet of seawater. One prehistoric temple constructed from "rectangular blocks of unbelievable size" now lies at the bottom of Valletta harbor, still seen in 1536 stretching a considerable distance out to sea.12
Ggantija itself is a temple of advanced design yet there is no evidence of its gradual development. The temple arrives perfect, on an island too small to accommodate the kind of urban population and architectural civilization required to pull off such an engineering marvel.13 But what if Ggantija was once part of a megalithic culture when Malta suffered a calamity of such magnitude it altered the region beyond imagination and wiped out its ancients architects, leaving the temples to decompose, before the gods returned under more favourable conditions to engage in rebuilding the island’s temple culture? Evidence shows that parts of Malta have been overwhelmed by tidal waves that swept across the island due to collapsing land bridges, violently stuffing animals, people and artefacts into caves. Figurines of the Earth Mother, carved in a style contemporary with Mediterranean and Near East art between 7000-14,000 BC, were found among accumulated flood debris. Like Jericho, Malta appears to have been at the mercy of unstable climatic conditions following the end of the Younger Dryas, particularly from melting glaciers and collapsing ice dams still covering northern Europe, frequently releasing trillions of gallons of meltwater that rushed into the Mediterranean.
Let us assume Ggantija — and Malta's other twenty-seven known sites for that matter — belongs to a remote age, say, 14,000 years ago, not a far-fetched idea considering the aforementioned shell-encrusted megalith found at the bottom of the sea lies to the northwest of the island. So let's play with this epoch.
Ggantija has two entrances whose axes are slightly misaligned as though tracking two related yet separate objects above the horizon. Due to the effect of precession, the Sun has crept steadily northwards with each passing millennia. By c.12,000 BC it rose in alignment with the upper entrance of Ggantija on the spring equinox, casting a ray of light onto an alcove at the rear of the temple. At this same time, the lower entrance marked the Major Lunar Standstill, the point when the Moon’s orbit reaches its southernmost position. Both entrances face a hill across the valley whose summit was entirely levelled to achieve the effect.
Ggantija’s unusual double axis, one for the Sun, the other for the Moon.
Such a remote date is more consistent with weathering on Ggantija’s older megaliths, in fact it subjects the temple to not one but two cataclysms — the start and end of the Younger Dryas — inflicting the kind of heavy damage that returning architects would have needed to address. Assuming they repaired the site by 9000 BC, it still left two thousand years of rainy weather to account for the erosion now seen on the upper layers of Malta’s monuments.
A CLIFFHANGER OF A DAY
Setting aside the enigma of the Maltese temples for a day, I made a point of examining another of the islands’ curiosities — parallel ruts incised deep into the limestone bedrock, resembling tracks made by the repeated passage of wheels, except the evidence points to the ruts having been bevelled and cut out of the bedrock with tools.14 No sensible explanation has been forthcoming as to how they got there or why. The ruts cross the island and often stop at significant megalithic structures; some are interrupted by 3000-year old Punic graves, so at least it is certain they predate this period. Whether they are a clue as to how the limestone blocks were ferried to the temples is a matter of speculation.
The ruts on the north side of Malta cut through towns and gardens, run to the water's edge and continue unobstructed for a considerable distance under the sea. It is true that the north side of the island is sinking, yet the rate at which it is doing so cannot explain the depth to which the ruts descend below sea level; it can be argued that a combination of slippage plus a rise in sea level c.3000 BC is to blame, making the them only five to six thousand years old.
The same cannot be said for the south coast, which, for the most part, is one 600-foot vertical cliff. It was quite an experience to follow the ruts through arid scrub, right up to the cliff edge, and pick up the trail underwater, evidence of how the southern section of the island dramatic collapsed. The historian Louis De Boisgelin visited Malta in the late 18th century and commented on this: "The ruts may be perceived underwater at a great distance, and to a great depth, indeed as far as the eye can possibly distinguish anything through the waves."15
It appears the island was subjected to a substantial impact that caused enough pressure to split the bedrock along a fault called the Pantalleria Rift. Unlike the northern coast that slopes gently into the water, the southern coast borders a deep canyon which in 16,000 BC was already filling with seawater, with the coastline still a considerable distance from Malta. It took a stupendous rise in sea level at the end of the Younger Dryas for the Mediterranean to finally reach present-day Malta, a process that concluded by 7000 BC. The question th
at remains is what might have caused the cliffs to collapse in the first place?
Hagar Qim and its various, and progressively smaller stages of construction.
One candidate is a massive wall of ocean water that rammed through the deep, narrow canyon then separating Morocco and Gibraltar — as ancient writers claim — inundating the Mediterranean basin, collapsing land bridges, and turning landmasses into islands. This was also the opinion of De Boisgelin: "A variety of phenomena prove that there must have been a great extent of land towards the south and west [of Malta], and that it must have been destroyed by some very violent cause out of the common course of nature. It appears that this destructive shock came from the west, and that it acted with the greatest force... we can only attribute the present state of things to an immense body of water... it also destroyed that part of the mountain which united the three islands, and this inundation has stripped them of all vegetable earth."16
The enigmatic ‘cart ruts’ of Malta.
And as far as the tracks at the edge of the cliffs are concerned, "this circumstance gives every reason to suppose that the ground must have sunk very considerably in this spot."17
A sudden subsidence of land was most certainly the case because the ruts along the top of the southern cliffs continue underwater for three miles and reappear along the top of the tiny island of Filfla, 500 feet above the sea, still seen there by visitors in 1911.