He lowered his head to my 1.68 metres and whispered importantly: ‘Sir, this is a holy place!’ Of course, if this was a holy place I would have to be very obedient, otherwise there would be nothing but trouble. And in the back of my brain lurked the thought that if there was anything worth photographing, I would manage it somehow.
The camera custodian clapped his hands and a really impressive figure, a few centimetres taller than his colleague, emerged from a small office. I had fallen among giants. The second one was a good deal younger than the first. He wore a red silk scarf round his neck and a Basque beret on his head. As eagerly as any guide worth his salt, he addressed me in a polyglot lingua franca from which I gathered that English was his best language and that he had two attractions to offer—the so-called Museum and the Hypogeum which had brought me there. Museum is an exaggeration as it consists of four glass cases built into the wall. I wanted to see them both. When I had given the young giant another two pounds and asked him to explain things in English, he led me to the small showcases.
The treasures which were found by chance in 1902 during the construction of the house in which we stood were neatly displayed. Had it not been for these rather dreary artefacts, it is unlikely that the Hypogeum would have been discovered. I call that a lucky coincidence.
I was just able to make out the object about which I had read and which especially interested me before my giant dragged me to the staircase. It was the ‘mother goddess’, a terracotta figurine some 10 cm long, which is also called ‘Sleeping Woman’ in some books. She reclines in a shell which rests on four feet; her thickset body is wrapped in a garment which I can best liken to the shell of a tortoise; she supports her heavy head on her bent arm; her legs are short and stocky.
I prick up my ears when it comes to sleeping mother goddesses, especially when they come from the Neolithic Age. Why were Stone-Age artists so keen on depicting mother goddesses? What does mother goddesses really mean? Are the figures meant to be mothers of the gods? That is sheer nonsense. In the world of ideas of the Stone-Age artist the gods had no dependants, no family, no mother.
Stone-Age mother goddesses like the duplicate I was looking at (the original is in the National Museum in Valletta) have been found at La Gravette, Laussel and Lespugue, France, at Cukurca, Turkey, at Kostyenko, the Ukraine, at Willendorf, Austria and Petersfels, Germany.
Naturally the name ‘mother goddesses’ stems from our time. Who knows whether the Stone-Age artists ever conceived of the figures as ‘goddesses’. Our clever attributions may make cataloguing easier, but I venture to doubt if they always get the meaning of what is represented. Never mind! These sculptures with their emphatically female and clearly pregnant attributes must have had a specific significance. Otherwise such figurines from the same period would have been found in so many places in the world. We shall see. . .
While my giant was guiding me down the stone staircase, he told me that what I was going to see had been found by chance at the turn of the century. I knew that from the literature. It was news to me that the original entrance to the underground world—a stone slab with a square hole in it—used to lie on a hill above the harbour. When a wall was built there, the entrance was walled up.
My cicerone, who had a great gift of the gab, climbed gingerly down the spiral staircase, although he had done it thousands of times before. The further down we went, the quieter he became. In the end he only whispered when I asked him a question.
When we reached the main hall of the middle storey, I exclaimed: ‘This is fantastic!’ and asked; ‘Why am I the only one here?’ ‘The Maltese don’t come because they’re afraid of the oracle. The hotel porters do send us tourists, but it’s out of season now,’ he whispered in my ear.
If the dating is right, we are told that over 6,500 years ago believers came to this hall to have their dreams interpreted by the priests in the next-door oracle room. I had read about the powerful acoustics, but I could hardly believe that softly spoken words would get louder, gathering volume and echoing through the hall. As if he knew what I was thinking, the young giant took me by the hand and led me to the niche. There he uttered long-drawn-out sounds into an ellipse hollowed out of the stone:
‘Ooooohhaaaa’ and ‘Uuuuuhhiii!’
The giant’s cries rumbled through the hall and bounced back off the walls as if amplified by the hi-fi system of a noisy discotheque. Even when he whispered, there were soft echoes from every niche and corner.
I simply had to try it myself. I stuck my head into the ellipsoid ‘mussel’ and spoke a long-drawn-out ‘yes’ into it. The higher I raised my voice, the more bizarre the resonance. If I lowered it to a sonorous baritone, it vibrated and echoed back from every corner. It did not escape me that the effect was particularly clear at a certain part of the ellipse. I directed my voice at it and reached the conclusion that concealed in the rock behind the ‘speaking mussel’ is a hollow space that acts as an amplifier, like the resonance box of a guitar. I assume, for of course you cannot see them, that hollow spaces branch out in the rock, transmitting the sounds and letting them out again in other parts of the hall.
As there were no ladies present, I was unable to carry out a test. Apparently the miraculous amplifier only works when a male voice speaks. Even if a woman raises her voice, the acoustics fail to oblige. Obviously I shall have to visit Malta again with a lady to whisper in my ear.
On my travels I have seen ancient sites that made a tremendous impression on me: pyramids and royal tombs in Upper Egypt, megalithic monster works in Turkey, the fortress of Sacsayhuaman above Cuzco, the ‘water conduits’ of Tiahuanaco and the gigantic statues on Easter Island, to name only a few examples. But the Hypogeum took my breath away. It was different from all the others.
Corridors, chambers and paths branch off from the great hall, niches and small chambers, two of which have painted ceilings, join on according to a well-thought-out plan. The niches and columns on which the dome of the hall rests are worked in faultless megalithic building style with clear-cut lines and sharp edges on the massive stone blocks. Even the dome is composed of curved monoliths.
‘Did Stone-Age men do all this?’ I asked my giant, who was enjoying my astonishment. He took off his Basque beret, twisted it in his hands and answered after a lengthy pause:
‘They say that all this was cut out with hammers . . .’
By ‘they’ he meant archaeologists. One could sense from his answers that he had his doubts. Seeing the caves daily, he must have formed his own ideas about whether his early ancestors could have carried out this Titans’ work with hammers.
As I was allowed to use my bright flashlamp, I could easily see that carving out columns, niches and sections of the dome was a masterly achievement. The monoliths that form the niches rise from the stone floor without joints and they are of the same stone as the floor. Like crossbeams in a precisely calculated construction, more monoliths lie on them and they in turn are topped with monoliths curved into the shape of a dome.
What kind of oracles were uttered down here? Three, four or five thousand years ago? The Phoenicians and Greeks did not consult the oracle. The sanctuary was covered over for thousands of years and hidden from the eyes of the immigrants. Graves that were found here are dated 1000 years earlier, to around 2500 B.C., and the Phoenician and Greek invaders can safely be accepted as arriving between 1400 and 800 B.C.
My lanky guide led me to a niche three steps lower down in which images of the gods may once have stood. He pointed to a hole in the ground that was closed with a stone slab. I learnt that there were a number of such openings and that excavations in the holes had revealed human and animal skeletons. No one knew whether the men and animals had been sacrificed. Even some thousands of years after the event the idea is horrible enough, but it is to get even more gruesome.
The middle storey in which we were is about eleven metres below ground level. We went down another seven steps. Now, at twelve metres, we were at the deepest point of the thr
ee-storeyed prehistoric complex. One last step and we stood in front of a rectangular dungeon. According to legend, it was used to dispose of unwanted intruders, to dump murdered enemies and for human sacrifice. Men who had volunteered to die went down there and graverobbers fell into fatal traps. The dead—7000 skeletons were found down there—guard their mysterious secret.
I read in a guidebook:
‘The underground temple and oracle of the unknown primitive population consists of several passages and rooms and is excavated or cut out of the rock three storeys deep under the earth.’
To this laconic statement we should add that enormous quantities of flint which did not and do not exist on the island must have been used for the hammers—as for the ruts.
The Stone Age gets its name because men worked with stone tools. Metal was unknown then. But neither was there any flint, which is harder than limestone, on Malta. Nothing, absolutely nothing is known about fleets or ships which could have brought flint to the island from overseas. They did not exist.
If we stubbornly consider the question of material as solvable, the main puzzle remains. For what reason was the Hypogeum built three storeys deep under the earth? There is also the problem of the highly skilled architecture. The goal must have been fixed from the first hammer-blow on the stone, the continuation of the work planned and the intervention of the stonemasons coordinated.
Let us imagine the work of a Stone-Age architect, just for fun. He scratched a few hundred sketches on palm leaves, following a model inspired by the gods in a dream. How else would he have thought of the daring construction of an underground dome for which there was no precedent?
Our bold Stone-Age architect planned his layout three storeys deep under the earth. Where did he get the necessary knowledge of stresses from?
What scaffolding did he give the stonemasons for the straight and curved monoliths? They had to bear their own weight and that of the storey above!
When our audacious architect laid his astonishing plans before the masterbuilder, the frustrating question of the necessary tools hung in the air. Given the existing state of Stone-Age implements, there was no answer. What a pity!
The building was greatly improved by the acoustics which I have already mentioned and by a first-class air-conditioning system! The Hypogeum has a built-in one. Whether a single person like myself visits the three-storeyed underground house or hundreds of tourists walk through the halls, there is little change in the temperature. Yet everyone knows how quickly the air in closed rooms warms up when people give off heat like living radiators. The system in the Hypogeum at Saflieni is as sophisticated as that in the underground towns of Derinkuyu in Turkey where the temperature is constant in summer and winter in all 13 (!) storeys below ground level.
In the case of Derinkuyu, scholars have agreed for the sake of simplicity that the sophisticated towns were built in post-Christian times (as if heating engineers were two a penny after Christ!). That is not true, but the dating must do as an explanation for the first-class ventilation system. We cannot take this easy way out in the case of the Hypogeum; its Stone Age origin is undisputed.
If the construction and stonework are puzzling and the acoustics a phenomenon, the Stone-Age air-conditioning fulfils requirements one can only describe as astounding.
It is thought that the hypogeum was built in three stages. Scholars think so, because halls and niches differ from one another architecturally. On the upper level, natural hollows in the rock were simply enlarged and smoothed, whereas in the main hall with its subsidiary rooms in the central storey a hitherto unexplained (artificial) megalithic method of building undoubtedly stamps the layout.
This explanation has a weak spot. The different techniques must have been used simultaneously, because both acoustics and ventilation system embrace the whole Hypogeum. Therefore the first architect and his successors must have had a clear idea of the finished complex from the beginning. Subsequent corrections or ‘installations’ cannot be made when a building is fashioned out of the stone.
To me, ruts, temples and Hypogeum are proof that ‘gods’ took a hand here.
I have to make a statement which will be superfluous to anyone who understands my theory, because I want to anticipate a remark that my critics will make as sure as eggs are eggs. I do not claim that ‘gods’ were at work here, laid out the ruts, erected the megalithic temples or built the Hypogeum. But I do speculate that ‘gods’ or their descendants were familiar with tools and dominated techniques which the Stone-Age men made use of. Obviously it is also possible that the early islanders worked zealously at the gods’ request to make the ruts, without knowing why they were doing it.
Is there a connection between all these apparent contradictions? Can ‘gods’, men, ruts and temples all be brought under one hat?
Homer described the adventures and misadventures of Odysseus, King of Ithaca, over a period of ten years. Driven on to Cape Malea at the south-east tip of the Peloponnese by a fierce gale, he and his ships visited the island of the Cyclops, the one-eyed giants. They were the builders of megalithic walls which are still described as Cyclopean masonry today.
It is often surmised in scholarly literature that the island of the Cyclops was present-day Sicily. It may be so, but not necessarily.
Malta and its four small satellite islands are only 95 kilometres from Sicily. Anyone who studies the megalithic buildings carefully will share my impression that giants did the work. Were they the ‘inventors’ of Cyclopean masonry?
One of the Cyclops, the giant Polyphemus, held Odysseus and twelve of his companions prisoner in a cave, the entrance to which he blocked with an enormous stone. Polyphemus could leave the cave at will because he could pull the stone away, but it was too heavy for Odysseus and his men. Polyphemus was the one-eyed son of the god Poseidon. And all the other gods on the island were also sons of gods!
Is there a mythological reference to what was once reality? Did giants live on Malta in the very remote past?
No one can deny that giants did exist at one time. Early traditions tell us vivid stories about them and ancient texts stubbornly assure us that they were descendants of the gods, ‘sons of heaven’.
In the 14th chapter of Enoch, who according to Genesis (5:18 et. seq.)was in immediate touch with God, we read:
‘Why have you done like the children of earth and begot giant sons?’
In Genesis (6:4), it says:
‘. . . the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives . . . There were giants in the earth in those days . . . mighty men which were of old, men of renown.’
Chapter 100 of Kebra Nagast, the Ethiopian work, contains this paragraph:
‘But every daughter of Cain with whom the angels had consorted became pregnant, but could not give birth and died. And of the fruits of their wombs some died, and others came forth; they split their mother’s womb and came out at the navel. When they were older and grew up, they became giants . . .’
Lastly a line from The Book of the Eskimos:
‘In those days there were giants on the earth . . .’
In Baruch actual figures are given:
‘The All Highest brought the Flood upon the earth and destroyed all flesh and also the 4,090,000 giants.’
In my book According to the Evidence I included photographs of recent fossil finds of giant footsteps, the latest proof from reputable sources of the former existence of giants. I have no desire to repeat myself, but must at least mention in passing the documented existence of prehistoric giants, otherwise it will be: But Mr von Däniken, there never were any giants! People like to overlook what is not supposed to be true. That is why I have to mention it.
Let us spell out the little word IF, so pregnant with significance!
If Homer was not merely giving rein to his poetic fancy, but actually handing on the core of real events in his Odyssey . . .
If Malta was the island of the Cyclops . . .
If Odysseus
landed there . . .
If the Cyclops were descendants of ‘fallen angels’ and therefore of the extraterrestrials . . .
. . . then ruts, megalithic temples and Hypogeum had some direct connection with the gods or their descendants.
Why?
Let us remember that some ruts lead into the depths of the Mediterranean and so came into being before the last Ice Age, when the sea level was lower than it has been for millennia. Now from the point of view of classical archaeology, there were no technologically skilled peoples at that time. If, as a logical conclusion, it could not have been the Stone-Age inhabitants who bequeathed us the monuments we admire today, who was it?
Did gods or their descendants leave a sign of their presence on Malta? Quite apart from technical relics, did they set up semen banks in some as yet undiscovered spots, the entrances to which will remain undiscovered until they are opened by a lucky coincidence, as in the case of the Hypogeum? May the mother goddesses be the key to the last puzzle? Are well-preserved cells from the bodies of the former rulers of our planet waiting to be found under rocks or in megalithic sanctuaries? Will sarcophagi with mummified giants be excavated some day?
Signs of the Gods? Page 10
