Malta, 5: The Ggantija Temple Complex On Gozo

Some highlights from the temple complex at Ggantija, c. 3,500 BC...

Drone view...helpful model #456,289; five apses on the left, four on the right

Approaching, dorsal view

It's warm and sunny; not that bad, but we're taking refuge under a carob tree

Approaching

Heritage Malta has done a wonderful job in displaying these sites and in
permitting access to them

So the thing here, if you're expecting Stonehenge, is that the rock is limestone;
it is easily worked; but it is easily weathered

One of the apses

One of the entry ways, looking back: finely worked orthostats

A wall in some danger of collapse; buttressed until they figure out how to save
it

How the ancients moved and set the gigantic stones is a mystery; some
theorize they used spherical stones, much like ball-bearings

Such stones appear in abundance at the various sites

Another apse

Another mystery is the holes in the big rocks...gigantic
cup-marks?

And then there are these "rooms," post and lintel, finely worked; we'll see more
of such at the Hypogeum, in a few days

Malta, 4: Museum Of The Ggantija Temples Of Gozo

For Ggantija read Gigantic, that is, made by giants. That's what the locals made of these megaliths, 5 millennia later, just as the classical Greeks thought the Mycenean strongholds they found had been built by a race of giants. The temple complex at Ggantija is perhaps Malta's oldest, reckoned as dating from 3,500 BC, and therefore a good bit older than, say, Stonehenge. The dates on all these things keep changing. I always think of our experience at Skara Brae, where, at the outset of our ranger-led tour, she announced we could simply add a thousand years to all the dates on the signage: a new calibration was in effect. Anyhow, from Malta to Portugal to Brittany to Ireland and the UK and beyond, western Europe was seeing its great three millennia of megalith building. We've seen most of these structures. Those that are so far known. Malta's are among the most distinctive and interesting: oriented uniformly to the southeast, clover-leaf in design, with "apses," now generally thought to have been roofed-over in corballed fashion. Some say they were "temples" in a fertility rite...corpulent female votive offerings here and there. Who knows?

Anyhow, the Ggantija complex has a great museum preceding the self-guided tour, and here are some highlights.

Entrance to the complex; yes, another of Malta's World Heritage Sites

The megalithic world...in Malta

One of the more famous of the corpulent figures

Other votives...reminding me a little of Cycladean
figurines we've seen elsewhere in the Mediterranean

Probably not non-stick

A selection of the ladies found at Ggantija

Also found at Gantija

Extrapolation

Simple foods, simply prepared; strangely, very strangely,
seafood play virtually no role in their diet (like the Vikings
in Greenland?)

More implements

And ornamennts

The complex at Ggantija has suffered much destruction, even in the modern era;
much of what is known comes from a series of watercolors by the early 19th
century German artist Charles Frederick de Brocktorff

Orthostat from one of the entrances

Malta, 3: Gozo Archaeological Museum

Gozo's archaeological museum is located within the Cittadella. Much of it addresses the neolithic sites on the island but it addresses succeeding millennia as well.

Entrance to the museum; in a older palazzo in the Cittadella

Basic stuff

Neolithic implements

We're here basically for Malta's "temples," huge megalithic
structures roughly contemporaneous with Stonehenge,
Avebury, Carnac, and such, 4,000-6000 years old; no one
really knows whether they were "temples" in the parlance
of our times, or maybe something else we have lost the
capacity to understand...

Helpful model #459057; we'll see the remains of a six-apse temple when we
get to the Tarzxen site on the Big Island

Speculations concerning construction

We'll be visiting the Ggantija temple; next day

Later implements

Much later amphora (Greek, Punic, Roman...)

An ever-popular Anne Boleyn, in her guise as Aphrodite;
1st century AD copy of Greek original; wait, no...

Maybe I have seen too many museums

Creepy; you never know what's going to be inside an amphora

Ever more implements