Malta, the Deep deep prehistory...
Before humanity Malta was at some point formed. It is lime stone. So that means it is formed from COUNTLESS CORPSES of tiny sea shelled life forms. I repeat the island itself is MADE OF COUNTLESS CORPSES. No really. It is. And on top of that... not all that much else, it really IS basically just a big ass lime stone rock there's just a bit of dirt, the odd bush, and some people on it, with houses and junk.
Presumably Malta was there when, at some point, the straights of Gibraltar basically opened up and the Atlantic ocean rushed in and flooded the Mediterranean sea into existence around it. Isolating the island. And presumably a bunch of the ancient mega fauna that were there.
Yes, Malta had Megafauna. That tiny rock was crowded with dwarf elephants, hairy rhinos and other super ancient mammoth era bullshit. We know this in large part due to various lime stone caves full of fossil bones from the period. And not just a little full. But literally PACKED with fossil bones from the period, like super dense bone to bone with barely any mud in between floor to ceiling, of some relatively big ass caves. I guess the island was trying to feed up on some extra calcium made up of even more countless corpses.
Maltese Mega Fauna apparently notably includes famous locals...
The Minorcan giant dormouse (some sort of huge mouse?)
Pygmy Hippos (specifically THE Maltese Hippopotamus)
Dwarf Elephants
GIANT SWANS (at about 2.1 meters from bill to tail they were TALLER THAN ELEPHANTS... well taller than the local dwarf elephants...)
And
CAVE GOATS
And these guys apparently lasted longer than other megfauna being placed sometime after the great Quaternary extinction event and just making it into the Holocene extinction, which puts them dying out maybe 9000ish years ago, and possibly at the hands of humans.
Another notable part of Maltese pre pre pre history, is that time there was a big ass earthquake and over half of the island SPLIT OFF AND SANK INTO THE SEA. Seriously, more than half the island is missing, you can go look at the cliff's where it just... isn't anymore...
Maltese Prehistory Now With Added Humans
Lets start with this. Malta contains the OLDEST BUILDINGS IN EUROPE. Older than the great pyramids even.
But anyway. Humans rocked up to the island in the Neolithic phase some time around 7000 years ago approximately 5000 BC. Apparently they could see it from Sicily and "land pressure" pushed them out there to farm. Well, considering the way the Sicilians and Maltese hate each other, if you went with the Sicilian version odds are it's more like "And as soon as there was an inkling of the idea of civilization they banished all the jerks to those tiny islands they could barely see because no way was that going ahead with the Maltese hanging around the place".
So... these guys hang around the place making pottery and doing the early mother goddess worship thing that leaves those funky little statues and hey, while we know next to nothing about the somewhat similar culture throughout Europe at the time, Malta is pretty much bread and butter regular mother goddess neolithic Europe.
But it's an Isolated island and it takes them about a mere 900 years to start diverging into the "Temple Period" when things start to get funky.
The Megalithic Temple Builders
So the temple builder history phases have some kick ass names. Lets just rapidly run through in order to show of the names.
Żebbuġ, Mġarr, Ggantija, Saflieni, Tarxien. No really those are the names, and better yet they are basically names of TOWNS in malta where various important archeological sites relating to those era's are.
Over all the temple builder period spans from around 4100 BC to 2500 BC, that's like wow, 1600 years there. But really for us laymen we might break it up into two main periods.
Ggantija and everything before it. Basically the typical mother goddess neolithics start out with increasingly curvy pottery with more swirls and “abstract humanoid figures” (very abstract, appear to be missing heads, on head sized jars) is burried in ceremonial rock cut tombs. Yes, that's right, the island was hungry for more bones and they FED IT, the fools. Their culture and agriculture took off. Their funeral pottery turned blood red with ochre and more curvey patterns. They started building giant stone temples. Big curvy ones with floor plans shaped like abstract deformed fat female torsos, sometimes with accompanying “child” temples beside them.
Their temples grew bigger and more complex they look a bit like elaborate stone henges, but with more complete walls, and even more impressive when you consider they probably had partial if not, by late period, complete, domed roofs originally. By the early Tarxian period they build a temple which has three altars in various rooms and at sun rise on the solstices and equinoxes it outright LIGHTS UP specific altars depending on which one it is. No bullshit “one misshapen stone kind casts a shadow at 50 degrees during equinox maybe” like the much lamer actual stone henge which isn't even BUILT until something like1500 years later.
So then we throw in the Saflieni and Tarxien as our layman's second later period. Their temples are super advanced, they build CRAP LOADS of them, like 40 or something, that they have found so far, remember this is a TINY island, and also remember some of the older ones are considered THE OLDEST standing stone structures in the world. Their burials start getting more and more elaborate and advanced. They do MASS burials. Over the 300 years of the Saflieni period they construct... the Hypogeum...
The Lost Underground Death Cult
So one day, in relatively recent times, 1902 apparently, some guys are working on some cisterns for a new housing development when they basically fall into an ancient forgotten temple full of human bones. And that, is...
The Hypogeum
Initially it was explored by a Cathollic Priest (so an experienced hand in the underground network full of human remains business) but he died after only 5 years before completing his report. No less than a KNIGHT took over in 1907. But then, that isn't unusual on Malta, Knights run all sorts of important projects out there. No really.
ANYWAY. The Hypogeum is promoted among other things as THE ONLY PREHISTORIC SUBTERRANEAN TEMPLE IN THE WORLD. That's what got in UNESCO status, and since no one else noticed, Malta minted a commemorative 2 cent piece back when they had their own currency to celebrate the listing.
What is really important about the Hypogeum is that it is huge, it was extended over 300 years form some natural caves into an elaborate 3 story deep... something... hell lets just trundle out a cut and paste table describing some portions of its contents for a second here and be amazed...
First Level
The first level is very similar to tombs found in Xemxija in Malta. Some rooms are natural caves which were later artificially extended. From evidence, one can say that this is the oldest level. The second level was only opened when the original builders found that this level was no longer adequate. This level is only ten metres below the street level.
Second Level
The level shows magnificent skill in stonework. One can see several important rooms, such as the Main Room, the Holy of Holies, and the Oracle Room.
The Main Chamber
This chamber is roughly circular and carved out from rock. A number of trilithon entrances are represented, some blind, and others leading to another chamber. Most of the wall surface has received a red wash of ochre. It was from this room that the statuettes of the sleeping lady were recovered. Nowadays these figurines are held in the Museum of Archaeology, in Valletta, Malta.
The Oracle Room
The Oracle Room is roughly rectangular and one of the smallest side chambers has the peculiarity of producing a powerful acoustic resonance from any vocalization made inside it. This room has an elaborately painted ceiling, consisting of spirals in red ochre with circular blobs.
The Decorated Room
Out of the Oracle's Room, through the hammer dressed chamber, on the right is another spacious hall, circular, with inward slanting smooth walls, richly decorated in a geometrical pattern. On the right side wall the entrance is a petrosomatoglyph of a human hand carved into the rock (Agius).
The Snake Pit
The second level contains a 2 metres deep pit which could have been used for either keeping snakes or collecting alms.
Holy of Holies
The focal point of this room is a porthole within a trilithon, which is in turn framed within a larger trilithon and yet another large trilithon.
Third Level
The lower storey contained no bones or offerings, only water. It strongly suggests storage, maybe of grain.
Yes they retrieved “sleeping lady” statues. Yes the interior used to be PAINTED RED. Yes there is a side room painted with red spirals and mystery blobs that has “powerful amplifying acoustics”, Yes the decorated room has
PETROSOMATOGLYPH of a human hand no less.
YES it has a room they call a mother fucking SNAKE PIT.
YES there is a room that consists largely of megalithic stone henge like doorways... within doorways... within doorways...
YES the third level is arguably the spookiest description of all.
One thing the suspiciously dated and questionable cut and paste description leaves out however is the place was PACKED with human remains.
Now to take a moment of sobriety. Catacombs and Ossuaries are very sensible on a tiny island and hardly anything new... Well. Screw it BACK THEN THEY WERE FUCKING NEW. Not to mention bones from as many as 7000 people were found in this place.
THIS IS NOT THE ONLY MASS UNDERGROUND HUMAN BONE COMPLEX FROM THAT ERA. There are hints that the hypgeum may not be unique (on Malta that is), there might be, or have been, others out there. Undiscovered or destroyed, what they DO know are out there is underground mass burials/underground ossuaries of some form attached to the late Traxian period temples in particular.
YES that is right, the temple builders started out feeding the island bones with individual burials and then started feeding it bones by the THOUSANDS of human individuals at the hieght of their glorious red painted spiral insanity!
And things got insane. The architecture slowly diverged into some sort of missing link between neolithic henges and ancient greek style temples, only completely different from what that would look like because these smooth slabbed stepped domed red ochred megalithic swirl carved wonders never evolved into anything because... well lets get into that in a moment...
But anyway INSANITY! Other than the feeding more and more bones to the lime stone rock islands we have...
The Headless Venus
OK so fertility goddess statues are weird. They are often faceless or have shrunken heads. Certainly the OLDER maltese ones start out pretty familiar, and by the looks of it they kept some of the older images (perhaps literally kept the same ones) as relics in their temples right up to late period, that “Sleeping Lady” is fairly typical, if you ignore the whole sleeping on a couch bit.
BUT. Some of them are of unclear gender. There are a few floating around that are almost definitely male. There is that ONE
half of a at some point more than 2 meter tall obese limestone colossus from late period that could readily have been a goddess, god, priest king/queen or mad island emperor or fuck knows what.
One very strong theme though is a mysterious lack of heads on a lot of them. Especially the ones suspected to be your more religious/fertility symbols. SOME suggest they had separate (possibly exchangeable) heads made out of some sort of finer material long since lost. But none have ever been found to my knowledge and even if they were THAT is sorta weird.
What we do have is lots of little headless statuettes of heavily fattened probably female humans. That is spooky. With an upswing of this as the cults swing into full on giant catacombs full of their own private bone collections mode that is SUPER spooky. Sadly there is no direct evidence of human sacrifice or cannibalism, but they DID at the very least engage in probably ritual sacrifice and probably ritual feasting on animals in the temples. Temples which included some pretty big headless goddess statues. With a sorta neck niche just about the right size to comfortably place a severed human or animal head in...
The Extinction of the Temple Builders
We've heard it all before, mad fertility death cult priest king civilisation, spirals into self/death/ceremonial burial obsessed temple building insanity, famine and disease strike, everyone burns down the temples and disperses to try again.
Thing is that MOSTLY happens in
Central fucking America. This is the literal middle of the origins of western civilisation here. And that seems to be sort of what happened.
The religion/culture become death/ossuary obsessed probably because the island was hungry and made them feed it bones. Things went a bit pear shaped there is some evidence of disease or famine or something, a bit of a spike in bone collection and... bam... apparently Armageddon.
Overnight the temple builders were gone. Most likely the priest solution to everything was “Moar bone temples for the bone temple gods!” and when that didn't work there is evidence that the temples were burnt by whatever survivors there were as their last act as an organised society of torch and pitchfork wielding rioters.
Though, while it's pretty clear that in most cases in Central America when the corn god died and the civilisation “mysteriously disappeared” everyone who survived the riots basically just wandered off into the jungle until it was time to start building the next death pyramid related culture, in the case of Malta... there is no evidence that the survivors turned up anywhere. One thing is relatively certain, they weren't on Malta anymore.
The temple builders were basically extinct and the island was once again basically unpopulated by about 2500 BC.
STOP! CART RUTS!
WAIT! OK so there are these. er... cart ruts. All over the island, matching pairs of tracks cut into the very stone like reverse rail roads. All over the fucking place.
There are several problems with the Cart Ruts.
1)Nobody knows what the fuck made them.
Yes, FINALLY there is some evidence they COULD have actually been made by actual carts. Though..That may not actually fit some of the potential time periods. It MAY have been sleds, but... well that's a touch odd too. It MIGHT have been tracks for stone rollers for giant rock moving... but the tracks are all wrong for that too... Nothing quiet perfectly matches. But one thing is certain, they aren't natural. These things are all over the place, and in some places there are massive “junctures” packed with them criss crossing all over for no apparent reason.
2)Nobody knows when the fuck they come from
They aren't new. But they are unfortunately just about impossible to date. Some say they date back to early construction and possibly clean up of the old ruins when the new Bronze Age guys moved in after the collapse of the Temple Builder culture. Some people point out that a fair number of the cart ruts appear near at least one quarry site for stones from early temples (but not in any way that makes it certain they date to the building of those temples rather than other activity). OTHERS point out the slighlty alarming fact that a lot of these cart ruts go off the edge of the cliffs along the coast line that sank along with more than half the island during a period that should really have been well before humans were even a thing.
Whatever the hell they are for, they are still there, being all, rutty and oddly mundanely oblivious to their inherit mysteries. And they were made by er... something... at some point in between the bronze age and prior to human existence, and were made by someone possibly the temple builders, or the Phonecians, or a culture of hyper advanced pygmy hippopotamuses, or... something.