Once upon a time, there lived an island of temple building people in what is now known as Malta. These people were peaceful and egalitarian. Highly technologically and artistically advanced, they constructed megalithic temples that endured for millennia, and in these temples, they worshipped Goddesses.
The Maltese temple building society existed from at least 5000 BP, to its sudden, and unexplained, cessation in 2500 BP. From 3500 BP to that date, the people who lived on the island created gigantic, and technologically sophisticated stone structures that are the oldest of their kind.[i] Wrought of coralline and globigerina limestone, forged from unhewn blocks weighing up to 30 tons, and erected in sacred spots on the landscape, these temples have left an awe-inspiring legacy.
Ta’ Ħaġrat temple, August 2021
Tombs and Shrines
It is most likely that the first farmers settled on Malta approximately 8,000 – 7,000 years ago in 6th millennium BP, around the same time that they settled Sicily. However, our first concrete evidence of their inhabitation is in 5266-4846 BC when the earliest evidence of them and their religious practices can be found on what would become the temple sites.
The early Maltese were ‘a stable, peaceful, artistic, people.’ [ii] Their life was based on mixed farming and survived with very little change for thousands of years, although their population substantially and naturally grew throughout the period. Whilst their temples were of majestic limestone, their own houses appear to have been made of mudbrick.[iii]
Although, in the beginning, evidence from deposits found on the oldest temple site; Skorba, indicate the ancestors to the temples were shrines made of mud brick. These shrines were ancestral, in both architecture and function, to the later temples. Rock-cut tombs were the other ancestors of the temples. The earliest egg shaped rock-cut tombs were found at the Zebbug and Xemxija tombs (4000 BP). Their shape prefigures the later temple’s lobed ‘apse’ interiors, and show similarity to those found in Sardinia and southern Italy. Grave goods and figurines that were found in these tombs represent early portrayals of a divinity associated with the tomb: a Goddess of death and regeneration.[iv]
For the ancient Maltese, death was believed to be followed by rebirth, and religion was about reconciling humans with their mortality. The burial rites of the temple building people did not change much during the period. As with other Old European civilisations, their tombs were reminiscent of a womb: graves were made in the shape of eggs; often a simple egg-shaped pit or a rock-cut tomb to which the dead were placed in a contracted foetal position and sprinkled with red ochre. Newborn babies were buried in egg shaped pots. The placing of red ochre in graves and niches of subterranean tombs was an almost universal feature; it was extensively sprinkled on the skull or scattered all over the body. Red ochre is used world-wide symbolically for blood, and therefore life and regeneration.[v]
Red Ochre in the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum: Burial chambers and traces of red ochre in the Lower Level; and Red ochre painting in the middle level, photos from Heritage Malta.
Red ochre is a natural oxide of iron and it does not occur in Malta’s geology. Therefore, the presence of red ochra, as well as black obsidian, provide evidence of connection of the temple builders with other peoples.
The nature of the burials show it was an egalitarian society. This can be seen by the stark contrast to hierarchical societies where burials divide into numerous poor and simple ones contrasting with a few in which the dead were buried individually with large amounts of precious and exotic goods. These goods were imported deliberately to emphasise the prestige of an elite over the common people whose surplus production was tapped to support it. In contrast, in early Maltese burials, there is little differentiation between poorer and richer burials. Not until the much later Punic period could any tombs be described as wealthy, and still not as markedly as in many other places and in later times.[vi]
The Temples
Today, thirty temples are known about, however there were probably once many more. These Neolithic temples, along with their ancestral caves and tombs are roughly classified in seven phases, and the temples belong to the 5th, 4thand early 3rd millennia:
Chronological Chart of Malta
From Gimbutas, Marija, 1991, The Civilization of the Goddess: The world of Old Europe. Harper San Francisco: New York p. 174
The design of Malta’s temples is unique, they are unlike any other Neolithic structure to have been found in the world.[vii] By combining the two ideas of a built shrine and ancestral tomb, it is easy to see where the first lobed temples could have come from.[viii] The lobes of the tombs became the apses in temple architecture. These egg/womb shape bulges are arranged around a central temple entrance.
Temples of Mnajdra (photo: Daniel Cilia)
As the temples developed from shrines and or tombs, the temples themselves also developed in form over time. The six most intact temples that exist in Malta today, demonstrate how the temple’s size and structure developed: they seem to have been gradually made bigger during the period. For example, Dr John Evans sorted the temples into a developmental sequence: The first were the irregular lobed temples like Mgarr East and Kordin III; these evolved into the three-apse trefoils like Ta’ Ħaġrat; later temples had four or five apses; finally, another pair of apses were added to give Tarxien Central its six apses and a niche.[ix]
Diagram at the National Museum of Archaeology, Valetta, Malta
In the same way that the shapes of the earliest tombs have been likened to eggs or the goddesses wombs the four or five-apse temples have shapes that can be likened to that of the rotund goddess sculptures.[x]
The temples were built near each other. They tend to be clustered in pairs, threes and there is one four. Typically the groups of temples occur in larger pairs with one complex significantly larger than the other, like mother and daughter, a pair of sisters, or the representation of two different aspects of the same divinity: youth and maturity, or death and regeneration. The east has long symbolised birth and the west, death. This seems to be reflected in the temples, as in their pairs, the western temples tend to have paraphernalia to do with death and regeneration and they tend to be built of darker brownish-red limestone. The eastern temples are lighter, more spacious and made of a lighter limestone.[xi]
Inside, the temples have three zones. The first, the forecourt, is spacious and open to the sky. It seems to have been designed for public and religious gatherings. Then there were two other zones within the temples: an internal central court with apses which lead off from it, and then an inner part with closed off smaller chambers. Sometimes these zones are open, and sometimes they are closed off from each other by a barrier or doorway.[xii]
The temples placement demonstrates a knowledge, and celebration, of astronomical alignments. At the Mnajdra South Temple the building marks the sunrise of the Equinoxes and Solstices. At sunrise on the Spring and Autumn Equinox the sun rises in line with the middle of the doorway to the temple. At sunrise on the Winter Solstice, the sun’s rays light the edge of a large, decorated slab to the right of the entrance, and on the Summer Solstice the sun’s rays light up the edge of a similar slab to the left of the same entrance. Two megaliths in the East Temple at Mnajdra seem to have been used to mark observations of the stars, through the drilling of a series of holes. Ħaġar Qim temple also seems to demonstrate an astrological alignment. On sunrise on the Summer Solstice, a ray of light enters through an elliptical hole in the wall of the main building. The light is projected as a crescent on a stone slab at the entrance to the apse and as the sun rises higher in the sky, the crescent of light travels down the slab onto the floor and slowly returns to a disk. The shard of a pot was also found at Ħaġar Qim which carries what looks like a solar wheel. A stone slab found at Tal-Qadi temple was found decorated with eight-pointed stars and a crescent moon.[xiii]
Although burials were found in the megalithic temples, this was not a practice of the temple building people. There is no sign of burials within the temples themselves until after they had been abandoned as places of worship. Instead, during that time, burials were confined to the underground cemetery temples: the hypogea. In fact, it seems likely that each community on the island would have excavated themselves their own hypogea, linked to the overground temple’s complexes.[xiv]
By the later Saflieni and Tarxien times, the great necropolises of Ħal Saflieni and the Xaghra Circle were in full use. The elaborate Ħal Saflieni is a complex and architecturally awe-inspiring underground graveyard. With its chambers, and ornate carved structures and ritual paraphernalia, together with the Xaghra Circle hypogeum, it is clear that these places were more than just cemeteries: They were temples in their own right.[xv] At Ħal Saflieni, aural effects would have been used in worship: the Oracle room in the Hypogeum has a niche which allows the voice to reverberate throughout the underground rooms. [xvi] The curved enclosed chambers, painted liberally with red ochre represent a regenerative womb.[xvii]
Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum: Burial chambers in the middle level and the main temple in the middle level, Heritage Malta.
Goddess Worship
The temples were the centre of communal religious activity. Several have heat-reddened hearths indicating the use of fire.[xviii] It is most likely that they were presided over by a priestess or priest, rather than encouraging individual trance-like shamanistic religious activity.[xix] Indeed, the sophistication of the design and build of these megaliths makes it difficult to see how they could have been planned, and the logistical problems of their construction overcome, without a small body of people organising the work. As those people were not chieftains, they are far more likely to be priests’ or priestesses.[xx]
One striking feature of the Maltese temples are that hundreds of ceramic figurines were found depicting the female form: evidence of Goddess worship. Ceramics were invented in c. 6500 BC and this marked the appearance of thousands of figurines and vases, temples and their miniature models, wall paintings, reliefs and countless ritual articles across the world.[xxi] The earliest pre-temple site – the Red Skorba shrine – housed five figurines made of stone and terracotta in the north room. Although none were complete, between them they allowed the full reconstruction of a standing female figure 9 cms high.[xxii] That they represent the Mother Goddess, archaeologists state ‘is the most economical explanation of these intriguing objects.’ [xxiii]
The figurines found in the temples differ in size, and form, however the vast majority of them are clearly feminine. Some of the earliest are depicted with large vulvas or pubic triangles. For example, the clay and stone figurines found in the Red Skorba temple were wearing triangular masks, with long necks, large breasts, a large posterior and a large public triangle. They wear a cinch belt and a necklace. In Ħaġar Qim temple, the best known stone sculptures of seated, squatting and standing fat ladies were found which show the remains of ochre paint and stand about 20 cms high.[xxiv] Another figurine found there was carved in a realistic form and standing 12.9 cms high, and is known as the Venus of Malta. At the Xaghra Circle a statue of two seated ladies, with their knees drawn up close to them, were found. A figurine known as the sleeping lady was found in the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum. She is a highly detailed figure and lies on her left side on a bed 12.2 cms long.[xxv]
Red Skorba figurine; Venus of Malta from Ħaġar Qim; the sleeping lady from Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum.
The role of the figurines was to represent life, as well as death and regeneration: the Goddess personifies the eternally renewing cycle of life in all of its forms and manifestations. From the artifacts, it seems clear that women’s ability to give birth and nourish children from her body was deemed sacred, and revered as the ultimate metaphor for the divine creatrix.[xxvi]
The latest dated temple - Tarxien west temple – housed the largest goddess in statute form. Cut from limestone, ‘Our lady of Tarxien’, would have stood at nearly 2-2.75 metres, however the figure is broken off at the waist.[xxvii] The supernaturally large figure’s surviving body wears a pleated skirt which is in the same style as other statutory found on the figurines of Ħaġar Qim. Her calves are unnaturally thick, but her feet are tiny. Given its size and prominent position, it is clear that the statute is a representation of the Goddess.[xxviii] Her obesity seems to depict regeneration.[xxix]
Peace and disappearance
Prehistoric Maltese society had an economy that supported complex architecture and art of an entirely different order of magnitude, far in advance of its neighbours. Although the society was only just above the subsistence level, they produced a small surplus to allow the import of a modest quantity of raw materials from abroad and a few luxuries such as stone for miniature axes.[xxx]
The architects who planned and oversaw the work, the masons who quarried and dressed the stone, and the sculptors who produced their carved or modelled masterpieces, must have been specialists, not just farmers working part-time. Those who made the pottery that has been seen in the temples were clearly accomplished. As such, there must have been some redistribution of resources to allow these skilled craftspeople to engage in their specialised temple building.[xxxi]
A remarkable fact about the culture of the temple building people is the complete absence of any form for warfare, whether weapons, defensive sites, wounds on skeletons, or any other.[xxxii] Whereas in other prehistoric societies warfare is evident in the burials in the form of weapons and defensive or fortified sites, in Malta, there was no evidence of conflict, either within communities in the islands or between them.[xxxiii]
Yet in 2500 BP, this extraordinarily sophisticated culture, suddenly ceased.[xxxiv] With the great temple of Tarxien, the temple building period of Malta came to an abrupt end, and it is not known what happened for the temple builders to disappear.
The people that inhabited the island after the temple building people were completely different from them. No single element of the culture of the people who replaced the temple building people can be traced back to them.[xxxv] Their pottery showed a complete break from the pottery-making traditions of the previous phases in every respect: they differ in thickness, colour and vessel shape.[xxxvi] Their burial practices were completely unlike their predecessors: the newcomers cremated their dead before burying them. Finally, these new people brought knowledge of metal with them.[xxxvii] Malta has no natural metal sources, and the temple building people did not seem to know about its means, yet these new people must have obtained metal from abroad and it to fashion weapons: flat metal daggers.[xxxviii]
With the influx of these new people the temples collapsed literally as well as metaphorically. At Skorba great chips were knocked out of the temple structure before new and rougher walls were botched in the Bronze Age. Without exception, the temples were abandoned for religious practices. Tarxien was turned into a cemetery and Skorba and Borg-in-Nadur were taken over by squatters. The others appear to have been left to crumble away, perhaps deliberately avoided for superstitious reasons.[xxxix] The Xaghra Circle hypogeum was sealed off.
In stark contrast to the temple building people, the newcomers were war faring people. Daggers were prominent in the succeeding Tarxien cemetery, and fortifications of impressive size were found at Borg in-Nadur and elsewhere showing evidence of war. They built their homes on hilltops in order to provide a natural defence as well as showing evidence of defensive walls.[xl]
We do not know what happened in Malta in c. 2500 BP to change the society from that of a technologically and artistically advanced, egalitarian goddess worshipping civilisation, into a less sophisticated culture based on hierarchy and war. What seems most likely is that the destruction of the Maltese temple building society was simply the next victim of the wave of Indo-European incursions that were spreading across Europe from 4500 to 2500 BC. This wave was transforming European society economically and socially from a learned theocracy to a militant patriarchy, from a sexually balanced society to a male dominated hierarchy.[xli]
By whatever means the temple building civilisation passed away, the glory of the temples was gone, and it was succeeded by a much lower level of culture, apparently owing nothing to what had gone before.[xlii]
Temples that you can visit in Malta:
· Ta’ Ħaġrat Temple
· Skorba Temple
References
[i] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 69
[ii] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 236
[iii] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 208
[iv] Gimbutas, Marija, 1991, The Civilization of the Goddess: The world of Old Europe. Harper San Francisco: New York p. 174
[v] Gimbutas, Marija, 1991, The Civilization of the Goddess: The world of Old Europe. Harper San Francisco: New York p. 281 & Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 45
[vi] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 235
[vii] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 70
[viii] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 88
[ix] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 86
[x] Gimbutas, Marija, 1991, The Civilization of the Goddess: The world of Old Europe. Harper San Francisco: New York p. 174
[xi] Gimbutas, Marija, 1991, The Civilization of the Goddess: The world of Old Europe. Harper San Francisco: New York p. 176
[xii] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. pp. 106-108
[xiii] Stroud, K. 2015: Ħaġar Qim & Manajdra Prehistoric Temples. Heritage Books in association with Heritage Malta pp. 42-43
[xiv] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 116
[xv] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. pp. 117-118
[xvi] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 111
[xvii] Gimbutas, Marija, 1991, The Civilization of the Goddess: The world of Old Europe. Harper San Francisco: New York p. 286
[xviii] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 107
[xix] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 115
[xx] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 236
[xxi] Gimbutas, Marija, 1991, The Civilization of the Goddess: The world of Old Europe. Harper San Francisco: New York p. 222
[xxii] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 42
[xxiii] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 43
[xxiv] Gimbutas, Marija, 1991, The Civilization of the Goddess: The world of Old Europe. Harper San Francisco: New York p. 176 & p.223
[xxv] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 100
[xxvi] Gimbutas, Marija, 1991, The Civilization of the Goddess: The world of Old Europe. Harper San Francisco: New York pp. 222-223
[xxvii] Gimbutas, Marija, 1991, The Civilization of the Goddess: The world of Old Europe. Harper San Francisco: New York p. 181
[xxviii] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 112
[xxix] Gimbutas, Marija, 1991, The Civilization of the Goddess: The world of Old Europe. Harper San Francisco: New York p. 265
[xxx] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 234
[xxxi] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. pp. 215-216
[xxxii] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 239
[xxxiii] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 235
[xxxiv] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 238
[xxxv] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 245
[xxxvi] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 270
[xxxvii] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. pp. 246-247
[xxxviii] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 292
[xxxix] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. pp. 238-239
[xl] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 252-234
[xli] Gimbutas, Marija, 1991, The Civilization of the Goddess: The world of Old Europe. Harper San Francisco: New York p. 401
[xlii] Trump, David, H. 2002. Malta: Prehistory and Temples. Malta’s living heritage. Midsea Books ltd: Italy. p. 241