Now you see it, now you don’t
Malta, 6–20 June 2000
During the two weeks we were in Malta before the June 2000 solstice we devoted an intensive week to diving. A Maltese friend, George Debono, supplied the boat – a small, comfortable cabin cruiser that is his pride and joy – and he, his son Chris and his sister Amy spent days with us tracking back and forth on the thankfully calm seas off Sliema. Dive support, tanks and refills were provided by Andrew Borg, a friend of George’s and a top-flight diver who worked with us untiringly. We were lucky enough to have with us from Britain Tony Morse, a professional geologist and a PADI dive instructor in his own right. And Hubert Zeitlmair was on board as well, his confidence renewed each morning as we set out that that this would be the day on which we would relocate his missing underwater temple.
But we never did. We dived and dived and dived again yet we could not find it – as though it had dissolved in the sea or, like some magical castle, had the power to appear and vanish, appear and vanish …
In the Grail Castle Parsival fails to ask the right question and the Fisher King and his Knights and all the maidens of the procession, and the Holy Grail itself, and the castle too disappear without a trace. Was that what I did off Sliema? Did I fail to ask the right question?
I had certainly become over-focused on Zeitlmair’s notion that his temple was on a sea-mount 3 kilometres from shore. That, at any rate, is what I kept us looking for, even though I remembered Shaun Arrigo insisting the previous November that the site he had filmed for Zeitlmair was not 3 kilometres out but just 1. I would have liked to conduct a thorough search at both distances. But the problem was that I could only afford to devote a few days to speculative diving around Malta – a week at the most – and it made better sense to investigate one area well than two areas badly. So I had to gamble. One kilometre or 3?
I liked the level of conviction Zeitlmair radiated that the temple ruins stood on a shallow spot surrounded by deep water and I felt reasonably confident that such a place (with or without a temple on it) did exist off Sliema. Part of it was the possible uncharted reef on the Royal Navy aerial photo that Zeitlmair had shown me at our first meeting in the Diplomat hotel. And more provocatively, although it is difficult to judge distances accurately at sea, the very first of my November 1999 dives seemed to have been in exactly the right place on a reef with exactly the right profile – which, unfortunately, I had not searched properly.
So surely all we needed to do was find that reef a second time, which shouldn’t be too difficult, I reasoned, since we’d already found it once – get its GPS bearings and then search it thoroughly from end to end until we came to the temple.
But neither the temple nor the uncharted reef wanted to be found twice – at any rate obviously not by us. We abandoned the diving on the 14th. On the 15th I met Joseph Ellul and saw his original of Zeitlmair’s aerial photograph and the press-clipping that he kept of Commander Scicluna’s modest 1994 report of having found a temple underwater off Sliema. And this shifted my perspective on the whole problem. Because nowhere in Scicluna’s understated letter to the Sunday Times of Malta had he said what distance from the shore he had been diving at when, in his own words, he had located ‘a prehistoric temple … under 25 feet of water … at Sliema’ (see chapter 15). It was Joseph Ellul’s lively mind that had put the two things together – on the one hand, Scicluna’s testimony and, on the other, the general location off Sliema of the ‘reef’ indicated in the aerial photograph – and it was Joseph Ellul who had concluded, not necessarily correctly, that the temple Scicluna had seen must be located on that reef. Zeitlmair had then taken the inquiry to the next logical stage by hiring the Arrigos to dive the site for him by proxy. And lo and behold, when they had done so they had found and filmed something that looked quite a lot like a temple.
But the opportunities for miscommunication between Zeitlmair with his heavily accented German English and the Arrigos would have been legion and the whole business of agreeing on the exact area in which to pursue the search would have been doubly complicated by Zeitlmair’s blindness. Now, over two seasons, I had looked where Zeitlmair had said I should look, and dived where he had said I should dive – pretty thoroughly, I should add – and had failed to find his temple.
Was this because it wasn’t there? I would have thought so if it hadn’t been for Scicluna’s letter. Or was it because we’d been looking in the wrong place? Maybe Zeitlmair and I should have listened more carefully to Shaun Arrigo in November 1999 when he’d insisted that the site was just a kilometre from shore.
More Fat Ladies
If the Sleeping Lady is a form of the Goddess then it is probably significant that two such figures were found in the Hypogeum while none have been found elsewhere … But other ‘Fat Ladies’ – sitting down or standing up, sometimes miniature and sometimes carved on a fairly grand scale out of limestone – were found by the excavators at all the major megalithic temples of Malta. The original of one of these sculptures, from Tarxien (a replica remains on site at the temple) has been moved to the Museum and dominates the room next door to the two Sleeping Ladies. This obese figure is reckoned by Colin Renfrew to be ‘the earliest colossal statue in the world’.32 David Trump believes that she must surely, from her ‘size and position’, be ‘the Goddess herself’.33
When complete she stood about 2.75 metres high, but time, weather and above all the local farmers have reduced her to waist height … She wears a very full pleated skirt. It would be ungentlemanly to quote her hip measurements, and her calves are in proportion. She is supported, however, on small, elegant but seriously overworked feet.34
The section of the Museum overlooked by the Tarxien colossus is lined with long glass panels. Arranged behind these, like Bangkok prostitutes, a harem of Fat Ladies in varying stages of undress lounge and slouch – all of them disconcertingly headless (although no significance should be placed on this since the evidence suggests that the heads have simply been lost with the passage of time).
The group includes figures from the temple of Hagar Qim thought to date to around 3000 BC retrieved from a strange cache, a time capsule, found ‘secreted under an inner threshold step’.35 Of particular note are the so called ‘Seated Goddess’ and the ‘Venus of Malta’. The former, 23.5 centimetres high,36 has luxuriously corpulent hips, buttocks and thighs; her ankles are crossed in front of her – crossing the legs would be impossible for a person so fat – and her bulging arms are folded. The Venus of Malta, 13 centimetres high and fashioned from clay,37 has been praised by many observers for its anatomical exactness and ‘startlingly realistic style’.38 Again, the Mother Goddess attributes of huge breasts and thighs are unmissable.
The remaining figures on display are summed up nicely by David Trump:
Some are standing, naked or wearing only a pleated skirt, others also skirted, seated on some kind of stool, with legs to the front, yet others naked with the legs tucked up to one side. One or both arms are usually across the chest, the other may hang at one side.39
Origins in the Palaeolithic?
I have never visited any of the painted caves of Palaeolithic Europe – Lascaux, Chauvet, Laussel, Peche Merle, Lespugue, Altamira, Cosquer, and dozens upon dozens of other sites – although I still hope, in this lifetime, to have the opportunity to do so. The majority are permanently closed to the public with no possibility that they will ever be reopened and in some cases, as at Lascaux, there is even a long waiting list for access to the (apparently rather good) walk-through model that has been built near by. But I recoil at the idea of touring a model and don’t think it is necessary to do so, or even to be an ‘expert’ on the extraordinary artistic achievements recorded inside these caves, to recognize that the Venus figures found there – dating back as far as 30,000 BC – do bear close comparison to the big-breasted, big-hipped Venuses of Malta, the ‘Fat Ladies’ represented again and again in the megalithic temples, and the Sleeping Ladies of the supposedly Neolithic
Hypogeum.
My choice of the word ‘supposedly’ here is deliberate. The Hypogeum is supposedly – not definitely – a Neolithic structure.
However, it has been assumed to be Neolithic since its discovery and has been regarded as securely dated – to between 3600 and 2500 BC – since the introduction of calibrated radiocarbon-dating more than a quarter of a century ago.40 The habit of viewing it in the Neolithic time-frame is therefore deeply ingrained and not a single scholar within the mainstream has considered the alternative possibility that is suggested by the Mother Goddess figures, the cave-like subterranean labyrinth, the use of red ochre and black manganese pigment – and many other curious and notable features. This is the possibility that the Hypogeum, or parts of it, as well as the ideas and symbolism it enshrines, might have been misdated to the Neolithic 5000 years ago – might in fact date back to the Palaeolithic more than 10,000 years ago.
It is thanks solely to the efforts of three determined Maltese scientists, all medical doctors with a deep and abiding ‘amateur’ interest in prehistory, that this electrifying possibility, brushed under the carpet for a century, is today on the agenda for serious discussion.
Anton Mifsud is senior consultant in Paediatrics at Saint Luke’s Hospital, Malta, and President of the Prehistoric Society of Malta. His son, Simon Mifsud, is a senior registrar in Paediatrics at the Gozo General Hospital. Charles Savona Ventura is a consultant in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Saint Luke’s Hospital, Malta. Together and separately they have presented a devastating critique of the comfortable archaeological consensus, reported in the last chapter, that the Maltese islands remained entirely uninhabited by human beings until around 5200 BC.
Recently, to their credit, some archaeologists have begun to pay attention and to do so publicly. Writing in 1999, for example, Anthony J. Frendo had this to say:
The earliest human inhabitants on these islands are currently thought to have come here around the end of the sixth millennium BC during the Neolithic period. This quasi-dogmatic stance was severely put to the test when Anton and Simon Mifsud claimed that this date had to be pushed back to a much earlier period, namely the Palaeolithic.41
After reviewing the detailed findings presented in their 1997 book Dossier Malta Frendo concludes that the Mifsuds’ claim, though revolutionary, is in fact correct and that their work has proved ‘beyond any reasonable doubt’ that human beings were present in Malta during the Palaeolithic as early as 15,000 to 18,000 years ago and that ‘Malta’s history is thus extended backward by eight millennia’.42
Reopening the question of temple origins
As Frendo is the Head of Department and Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Malta, this is no lightweight endorsement. If it is supported by other archaeologists – and it becomes broadly accepted that there were indeed humans on Malta after roughly 15,000 to 18,000 years ago – then the result, ultimately, can be nothing less than a complete rewrite of Maltese prehistory.
In chapter 18 we will weigh up the hard empirical evidence that underwrites the Mifsuds’ case. Meanwhile, I doubt whether archaeologists have yet properly understood the ramifications of their profession’s inevitable (and I suspect imminent) official adoption of the much earlier date of first human habitation that the Mifsuds propose. At any rate, if they have understood, I see no sign of it in the literature other than Frendo’s monograph.
For example, isn’t it obvious, once the presence of Palaeolithic humans in Malta is widely acknowledged, that this must force a radical revision of the perspective from which the Hypogeum and the megalithic temples like Gigantija, Hagar Qim and Mnajdra have traditionally been viewed? For even if further investigation reconfirms the conventional wisdom that these great structures were indeed built in the Neolithic between 5600 and 4500 years ago, the proof of a Palaeolithic presence in Malta must raise question-marks over the obviously sophisticated and well-developed architectural heritage that all the temples incorporate and express from the outset. It would no longer be entirely safe, or logical, to look exclusively outside Malta for the origins of the skills, knowledge and ideas invested in them – e.g. as part of the intellectual baggage carried by the presumed first settlers (the so-called ‘Stentinello culture’, thought to have arrived from Sicily 7200 years ago).43 On the contrary, an accepted Palaeolithic presence would raise the possibility that the temple heritage was not an import from Sicily but was instead the product of very long in situ development in Malta itself – perhaps in parts of Malta that have so far evaded detailed archaeological scrutiny and particularly in areas that have been submerged by the sea.
This is emphatically not to suggest that the wave of Neolithic settlement which archaeologists have detected in Malta around 7200 years ago did not occur – because it certainly did! It is to suggest instead a parallel hypothesis (my own, not the Mifsuds’, I hasten to add) that when Neolithic settlers first entered Malta from Sicily 7200 years ago they may have encountered the remnants of a much older, pre-existing culture which possessed and gradually passed on the secrets of how to build and align the temples.
Let’s not even dignify such wild speculation with the label ‘hypothesis’. Still it seems to go some way towards resolving the paradox noticed by David Trump that ‘though building in stone was introduced to Malta by the first settlers … the use of huge blocks, so-called megalithic architecture, is not known before the temple period’.44 Could this be because the stone-working culture of the ‘first settlers’ was fundamentally different, and inferior, to an architectural tradition that already existed in Malta before their arrival and which was the true author and ancestor of the Maltese megalithic temples?
17 / The Thorn in the Flesh
We amateur archaeologists do it for the love of it, and the excitement and adventure, whereas the so-called professionals are caught up in the ruts of the establishment. Above all, they have no right at all to claim any monopoly of interpretation.
Anton Mifsud, July 20011
Malta, 16 June 2000
Anton Mifsud is in his early fifties, of medium build, olive-complexioned, heavily tanned, with a lot of experience and humour and a nice combination of strength, tolerance and intelligence in his face. He is exceptionally open-minded and lateral-thinking by nature – telling me once that he didn’t automatically dismiss any idea, even if it seemed absurd. The point, he said, was to submit problems in history and prehistory to rigorous inquiry, find out the facts about them and then draw the conclusions indicated by those facts.
I first met Anton on 16 June 2000 when he signed my already much annotated copy of his explosive little book Dossier Malta. Just two days previously, on the 14th, I’d concluded that I wasn’t going to throw any more money into diving off Sliema. We’d looked, it hadn’t worked, the temple didn’t exist, and Malta didn’t love me.
Then on the 15th I met Joseph Ellul and read Commander Scicluna’s letter. So by the 16th, when Anton Mifsud came to visit me at the seafront apartment Santha and I had rented in Sliema, I was already more upbeat about the prospects of an underwater discovery than I had been for several months. I’d also recently acquired and carefully read Dossier Malta and begun to digest the implications of Mifsud’s research, hitherto unknown outside Malta.
Accompanying Anton that day was Charles Savona Ventura, with whom he has co-authored several books. He’s a big bear of a man who looks like a Mexican bandit and is a mine of information about Maltese prehistory.
How, I found myself wondering, had these two obviously busy and successful consultants in hospital medical practice managed to keep their day jobs and learn so much about the past as well? Because clearly they were not just interfering ‘amateurs’ in the world of archaeology … You only had to listen to them for two minutes to realize that they knew their stuff.
Malta: echoes of Plato’s island
Malta, 16 June 2000
As the conversation unfolded, Mifsud and Ventura got round to telling me about the latest slice of provocative u
northodox prehistory they were working on -Malta: Echoes of Plato’s Island2 – which would argue that Malta is a remnant of the lost island of Atlantis.
‘You’re not going to like our date for the flood, though,’ said Mifsud, who had read Fingerprints of the Gods, in which I first began to set out my case for a lost civilization destroyed at the end of the Ice Age more than 12,000 years ago – a lost civilization of the Palaeolithic, in other words.
‘Why won’t Hike it?’
On the one hand, Mifsud explained, he had strengthened and added to his evidence for a human presence in Malta during the Palaeolithic in the three years since the publication of Dossier. On the other, however, his new research for Echoes (with Charles Savona Ventura and two other co-authors) had led him to a distinctly non-Palaeolithic date for the deluge that he believed had destroyed a formerly much larger Malta – the prehistoric Malta that was, in his scenario, the source of the Atlantis myth.
Reduced to its barest essentials, Mifsud’s proposal is that a great land-bridge that once joined Malta to Filfla collapsed cataclysmically through faulting of the submarine Pantelleria Rift at around 2200 BC.3 He links this event, which would have generated massive tidal waves capable of flooding the entire archipelago, to the sudden demise of the temple-building culture that is well attested in Malta’s archaeological record at the end of the third millennium BC.4 And, in an elegant argument, he suggests that it was this lost megalithic culture, and its overnight destruction by earthquakes and floods c.2200 BC, that was recorded in ancient Egyptian annals, passed on to the Greeks, and in later times remembered as ‘Atlantis’.5 Mifsud points out that the relative chronologies for ancient Egypt and Atlantis given by Plato – with the latter said to be a thousand years older than the former6 – coincide with the relative chronologies for ancient Egypt and Malta (the former began to build with megaliths in the Pyramid Age c.2600 BC; the latter began to build with megaliths a thousand years earlier at Gigantija, c.3600 BC).
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