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| Business opportunity: dig a hole in the ground, put a barrier around it: people will throw money into it for no apparent reason; maybe not lots of money, but it adds up |
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| Every night, scoop up the proceeds; but always leave a few coins for "seed"; they also throw in credit cards, room keys, pens and pencils, maybe even an iPhone...sky's the limit |
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| In an earlier post I speculated about the corballing of these structures: a growing hypothesis: they were roofed in stone slabs, corbal-style |
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| Walkway; the holes are a mystery, one of many |
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| Neolithic painting? |
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| Flooring...post and lintel... |
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| Obviously they had the post and lintel thing down good |
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| But wait, there's more: lot's more: abstractions, spirals, animals... |
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| And the "skirted" corpulent figure |
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| "My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought, cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives..."...Rubens? Isolde? Brynhilde? Kate Smith? Mama Cass? Mother Earth? |
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| The carving, such as it is, is compelling; we'll see more at Malta's national archaeological museum in a couple days |
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| Among the mysteries--less so on Malta, where there is everywhere nothing but limestone slabs--is how they moved the big rocks and set them in place; they apparently didn't have big timbers; some theorize they used round rock rollers like these, found at all the sights, sort of as ball bearings |
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| Back inside the entrance office, an orthostat from one of the temple entries with sketches of neolithic or at the latest Bronze Age sea-going vessels; if so, the oldest such; I couldn't see anything, but the next shot perhaps represents what's there...pretty compelling stuff |
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| Even with changes in sea levels and land bridges and such, Malta would be pretty hard to get to without a boat |
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| Unassuming entrance to one of the world's great megalithic sites |
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| The street decor was no less mystifying |
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| But the Hypogeum, perhaps the toughest ticket in all the megalithic world, was not far away |
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