The ruts did not originate because of the temples, for if they had, the ‘rails’ would lead to the buildings and end there. But they don’t! In a dense network they run past the temples in all directions, and are also found where no temples or other buildings rear their ruins above the earth.
The ruts have not been mapped or measured. It would indeed be a laborious undertaking. In many places they are overgrown and no longer visible on the surface, then they suddenly emerge again. Houses have been built over them and they have been affected by the detritus of the millennia that have passed over them.
No one knows what this maze of ruts was used for or who made it. Nowadays there is a lot talk about interdisciplinary research. Archaeologists ask physicists, chemists and metallurgists to collaborate in the solution of puzzles like this. There is no question of such cooperation on Malta.
It is obvious that analyses of the ruts could fill in blank patches on the map of ignorance. Did stone balls, wooden ‘forks’ or cartwheels leave traces when they rubbed against the stone? No matter how the means of transport was built in days of yore, did it press minute organisms into the limestone or clay pores? Are there fossil pollen remains to be found that would help to date the origin of the ruts?
Today we have all the technical aids needed to examine the ruts running deep into the sea under the academic magnifying glass. Why doesn’t someone do it? Can and should we leave such a fascinating puzzle from our primitive past unsolved? Normally we westerners are so terribly sensible and thirsty for knowledge. Why not in a case like this?
It would be surprising if the fairy story of the calendar were missing from our survey of the various theories. It crops up in connection with the Egyptian pyramids, the hanging stones of Stonehenge and the ‘landing strips’ on the plains of Nazca in Peru. The assumption that the Maltese ruts, too, were part of a larger-than-life calendar system is the silliest ‘sensible’ answer to a wide open question.
Everywhere that these archaeological tear-off calendars stand for sale, they consist of fantastically large buildings and complexes which are outside the range of vision of a man walking at ground level. Did stupid Stone-Age men lay out these gigantic calendars because they wanted to find out when spring began or autumn was coming? Nowhere is it recorded that prehistoric peoples practised agriculture on a large scale. If they did do so, with their small populations, they would not have had enough men or time, not to mention the backbreaking work and superhuman efforts required, to set up central calendar stations of the kind we posthumously attribute to them.
Although my critics like to accuse me, even when they know better, of considering our early forefathers to be limited and incapable of personal achievement, I should like to take this opportunity of putting on record that I consider all species of homo sapiens, since he has existed on mother earth, to have been far too clever to have needed various kinds of so-called stone calendars to determine the change of the seasons. Our ancestors knew perfectly well from their observations of nature that spring followed winter, that the summer meant sun and the autumn cold.
In case I forget I should mention that scholars, as in other places, have speculated that the Maltese ruts were associated with a religious cult. We are not told what sort of cult it was. We do not learn for which gods, with their bird’s eye view, the network of ruts was intended. If this cult theory is to carry any weight at all, I should dearly love to know what ‘morse code’ message these religious ruts were supposed to send and which airborne gods were supposed to be recipients.
I have already quoted from the Lexicon of Archaeology that the megalithic temples are supposed to have been built around 2800-1900 B.C. and that the origin of the ruts is also dated to this period, i.e. at the end of the Neolithic and the beginning of the Early Bronze Age.
That is all unsubstantial.
Excavations and cave investigations showed that Malta had long been colonised around 6000 B.C. Statuettes of mother goddesses are 5000 years old. The Sicilians came in 300 B.C., the Phoenicians around 1400 B.C.
I have not found anyone who says that the ruts should be attributed to the Neolithic Age, but scholars do claim that they originated in the Bronze Age. Yet even this comparatively ‘recent’ dating cannot be right. Were the people of the period intelligent fishes? Or did they knock up bronze diving suits, with snorkels, wooden airpumps and transparent eyepieces, so that they could work at making ruts on the seabed?
To be brutally frank we are taking flight into the unknown. Not so, say many archaeologists; the rut network existed more than ten thousand years ago, when the coastline now under water was part of the mainland! But listen to me—what tools were used to cut, mill, drill or bore the grooves, which run for kilometres?
The answer, of course, will be flint tools. That sounds reasonable, for flint, which is harder than limestone, was the material from which implements were fashioned in the Early Stone Age. But geologists have not found any flint in Malta or its neighbouring islands! Are we supposed to believe that flint was imported in the enormous quantities that would have been needed for the rut system in the Stone Age (!), which is not noted for international trade?
Others say, that’s all wrong, Greek or Phoenician immigrants actually planned and built the network. Why not? But this idea does not get us out of trouble, either. According to all known records, immigrants who intended to put their knowledge to use in their new homeland always brought it with them and had already used it in practice. There is no trace of ruts in Sicily or Greece.
How grotesque the contradictions are! It is said that the megalithic temples were erected long before the later immigrants arrived. It’s enough to drive one mad! If the temples were already built when the ruts were made, they cannot have been routes for the transport of building material. Moreover, the theory that the ruts date to around 5000 B.C. does not take into account the fact that with insignificant variations the Mediterranean has maintained its present level for at least 10,000 years. In other words, the last immigrants ‘from western Greece’ are out of the question as rut builders.
I look on the Maltese cart-ruts as an exemplary case of a wrong archaeological approach. There is a wealth of explanations but if you scratch the surface of the fine façade, the varnish comes off and the whole threadbare edifice is laid open. Nevertheless, any old theory gets into some specialised book or other where it is enshrined as the last word on the subject, so regardless of what book a reader lays hands on the opinion published in it is the solution. That is how schools are formed which stubbornly propagate their opinions, because they are unaware of or will not tolerate anything different. The main thing is that a question can be erased as answered. A genuine and final solution to the puzzle is less important.
It is clear that something happened in Malta in prehistoric times that never recurred anywhere in the world. The island must have been a centre for someone and something. Another theory is that metal alloys were poured into the deep grooves. But this view falls down because the grooves must have originated in times when metal was not yet worked. The post-Ice Age alteration in the level of the Mediterranean proves this.
The following idea is worth a thought, too. Did saurians unknown to us mark the ground in prehistoric times, did they etch the strange tracks? The fact that the ruts run in parallel straight lines, with occasional curves, refutes this assumption, besides saurians do not leave regular shapes, but tread the earth at random.
We can also set aside the possibility that the ruts may have been open water conduits. No one can deny that water always runs downhill to the lowest point. Yet the ruts run over hills and valleys. Water can only be led uphill if the source of water pressure is at the highest point and the water is in a pipe. No pipes or remains of pipes have been found in Malta. If anyone in those days was clever enough to build a system of conduits, he would have chosen the shortest distance between two points and not built it in bizarre windings or zigzags.
A drainage system of this size would also have had t
o serve irrigation purposes, but the islands were poor and rocky at all times. Nothing flourished. Humus had to be imported! Only 40 years ago captains who watered their ships at Malta had to pay in humus rather than cash!
Are there any other explanations to examine?
Could it be that a natural product, unknown to us today, was cultivated in the ruts? Were silkworms farmed in their depths? Did some prehistoric algae culture exist that was used for food? We can erase those questions. To whom was the mass production from the extensive network delivered? The natives could not have used it all and as I have said nothing is known of a prehistoric merchant marine. Farmers as bright as that would have laid out their plantations more rationally—next to each other, not straggling over hill and dale.
Could the ruts, with their frequently bizarre twists and turns, have been an obsolete form of writing? This attractive speculation falls down when it comes to the ‘characters’ lying under water. Who was supposed to read them there?
If the absurd ‘writing’ was actually ‘written’ in the limestone ground before the Mediterranean reached its present level, the ‘readers’ would have had to be able to fly! Otherwise the writing, which covers a large area, would have been illegible.
Let us put another Utopian-sounding idea under the magnifying glass. Could a metal alloy have been cast in the ruts to serve as a gigantic antenna? Who could have been the constructor over 10,000 years ago, when metals were unknown? Not even the megalithic temple builders.
Have I overlooked anything essential? Has the most important thing escaped me? I don’t think so.
The megalithic temples are stone testimony that the earliest inhabitants of Malta worshipped their gods zealously and spared no effort to show their deep admiration of the heavenly figures. As you know, it is my view that the ‘gods’ were not fictitious figures, not the products of unbridled imagination. At some time they were real and physically very active beings.
I ask myself whether ‘my’ gods chose Malta as their goal in prehistoric times, whether they achieved something there that made the Maltese labour to cut stone signs in the ground in memory of or as homage to the extraterrestrials.
The General Manager of the Hilton Hotel in Malta, Mr de Piro, supports the original and intriguing idea that the ruts really were chiselled out of the rock by human hands. ‘Why all that effort?’ I asked him.
‘You know that if you trace a track ahead of a domesticated animal, say an ass, a horse or an ox, it becomes a creature of habit and will cover the special stretch on its own, just as it finds its own way to its stall. Perhaps an apparatus that touched the track was hung round the animals’ necks and then they went up and down the same stretch year in year out. That certainly would have left traces over the centuries.’
There is something attractive about the idea, but it did not convince me when I was on the spot.
The limestone ridge of San Pawl Tat-Targa lies between the towns of Ghargur and Naxxar. Exposed to wind and weather, heat and cold, the whole hillside is covered with ruts. A parallel track runs up over the ridge, makes an abrupt curve downwards and loses itself somewhere among the houses on the beach. No less than six more pairs of ruts cross the curve. But the points of intersection are not made in such a way that an animal could proceed further alone and independently. The crossings either end abruptly in a right angle or they are a different depth from the curved ruts, and sometimes they are as much as 81 cm deep, in which case any animal would have broken its bones. Lastly, some stretches simply peter out, after diminishing gradually. What happened to the animals then? And where are the paths made by their feet? The grooves themselves cannot have been made by animals, they are too deep and too pointed. When the ruts became level with the surface of the ground and vanished into thin air, so to speak, the animals must have ended up somewhere. Were they picked up by helicopter?
The theory that ruts may be connected with the building of the megalithic temples is most attractive and at first sight spiced with a touch of logic. The thirty megalithic temples which were built on the island of massive stone blocks and menhirs are edifices of Olympian dimensions. Malta has an area of only 247 sq km, Gozo an area of 76 sq km. New datings were made using the radio carbon method on the remains of wood found in the megalithic temple of Hagar Qim. The building was dated to 4000 B.C. The ancient Romans, whose oldest early Ice-Age settlement was founded in the first millennium B.C., were not yet active at that time and even the ancient Greeks’ first land conquests date to around 1200-900 B.C. This supersedes the view that civilisation spread in the direction of Europe from Sumeria by way of Babylon and Egypt. The Maltese architectural miracles originated in the Stone Age!
Although I do not trust the C-14 method too far, because it is based on a constant relation to the radioactive C-14 isotopes in the atmosphere and finds of wood or bones say nothing about the time at which an archaeologically significant building was erected, I am still glad that Hagar Qim was dated to 4000 B.C. That at least fixes a minimum date. We can conclude that the temple is not more recent, but may well be older insofar as the dated wood remains were not left by the builders of the edifice.
In addition Hagar Qim is still a Maltese dialect word which originally meant something like the ‘prayed to stones’. Local archaeologists assume that the temple of Hagar Qim was dedicated to Phoenician divinities. Circa 4000 B.C.? Strange. There are no indications of the existence of the people from the ‘purple kingdom of antiquity’31 at that early date.
If the routes were connected with the temples, the strange lines should logically lead to them, but that is just what they do not do. The thirty temples are scattered all over the island and the ruts run past them in the same random fashion. There is the large complex of Tarxien near the town of Paola. Hagar Qim is only a few hundred metres from the temple near Mnajdra on the south coast. The temple of Skorba rises in the middle of the village, while the monumental prehistoric building of Malta, the temple of Ggantija, is to be found on the neighbouring island of Gozo. The great question is which came first—the megalithic temples or the ruts? It is as hard to answer as the old chestnut about the chicken and the egg.
There they lie, the gigantic monoliths. The millennia have passed over them. Have weathered and split them. When we look at the ruts, we think about how much rain has poured down on them, how many hundreds and thousands of times cold and burning heat have worked on them. Did they originally lie deeper in the ground? Have they been pushed upwards? Only one thing is definite: they were there before the Mediterranean reached its present-day level. Does this mean that the temples, too, should be dated to before the Ice Age? We do not know, but the assumption seems likely. But before I put forward my daring theories on the subject, I want to talk about another unique feature that Malta has to offer, besides ruts and temples.
South-east of Valletta in Saflieni, close to the town of Paola (12,000 inhabitants), the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum astounds the visitor. Hypogeum comes from the Greek and means ‘underground room’ (hypo = under, gaia = earth). In archaeological literature, the concept hypogeum stands for subterranean vaulted burial chambers and religious sanctuaries.
The house through which you reach the underground chambers differs from the others in the street by a massive door of four rectangular columns topped by heavy stone beams. A marble tablet on the wall reads: HAL-SAFLIENI PREHISTORIC HYPOGEUM.
The literature about this curiosity had been extravagant in its praise. When, after a long walk through streets that shimmered in the heat, I stood before the monumental limestone portal, I debated whether I should go in with my two heavy camera cases which were cutting into my shoulders like lead weights. For days a pitiless sun had been beating down on the dusty arid island. It was an atmosphere that considerably diminished even my boundless appetite for research. My shirt and trousers were stuck to my body. Finally I decided to enter. A quarter of an hour in the cool of the hypogeum would do me good. I stayed there all day and soon forgot that I had not been in a very good mo
od.
The entrance is at ground level; then you go three storeys down into the earth. A stately two-metre-tall Maltese emerged from the gloom of the hall and with weary inevitability took my camera cases from me. He could see that I was irritated and ready to argue, and quickly said: ‘No cameras!’, and in case I did not understand English added: ‘Défendu!’ He stowed my cameras in a wooden cupboard in front of which he cut an imposing figure. ‘Voilà!’
Even today I don’t really understand why you are not allowed to take photographs in many museums. They could ask for a fee, obviously, but that cannot be the reason, for I was ready to pay anything they wanted in the Musée de l’homme in Paris, but without success.
I often suspect that the guild of archaeologists dislikes objects being illuminated from viewpoints which do not have their blessing.
Having learnt from experience that a lavish tip sometimes works wonders, I pressed two Maltese pounds into the giant’s palm. He took them all right, but he would not even part with one camera.
Signs of the Gods? Page 9
