The prehistoric Maltese achievement and its interpretation

Abstract

It is a privilege and honour to be speaking here at the University of Malta, and for us to be celebrating together one of the most important achievements of World Prehistory. It is, at the same time, I think, one of the least understood achievements of World Prehistory, The great temples of Malta and the art of prehistoric Malta are not yet perhaps as well known universally as they ought to be. They are famous among archaeologists but I think they deserve still greater celebrity! Certainly when I was looking again at those great temples at Mnajdra and Hagar Qim yesterday, and then going down the Hypogeum at Ital Saflieni, I felt that if one were to draw up a list of the seven great monuments, the seven wonders of the prehistoric world, there is no doubt that one of these (perhaps one would choose Ital Salfieni, perhaps it would be the Ggantija), would be on the list. What I would like to do first is to set the scene, as it were, and to stress the point that we now know that the full development of these monuments, in the Ggantija phase, took place somewhere around 3500 B.C. in calendar years. In the early phase in their development we are speaking therefore of a phenomenon which is comfortably earlier than the pyramids of Egypt. The apogee of development in the Tarxien period can be placed somewhere between 3000 and 2500 B.c. These remarkable and complex monuments, with their extremely sophisticated art, including wonderful spirals, are thus to be placed in the third millennium B.C. Among those extraordinary works of art, the most remarkable certainly must have been the monumental figure of a woman, probably a deity set in the temple at Tarxien. As you know only the legs remain, but she must rank as one of the earliest monumental sculptures in the world, the only competitors perhaps being the sculptures of Egypt in the Old Kingdom.