Some of the oldest stone buildings in Europe
The Maltese temples are a group of Neolithic monuments on the islands of Malta and Gozo, built in stages from about 3600 BCE to around 2500 BCE. The earliest, such as the Ggantija temples on Gozo, are generally dated to about 3600-3200 BCE. That makes them considerably older than the main stone phase at Stonehenge, which is usually placed around 2500 BCE, and older than the Giza pyramid complex in Egypt, built in the twenty-sixth century BCE or so. They are not, however, “the oldest buildings in the world”: earlier monumental architecture exists, notably at sites such as the Gobekli Tepe monuments in southeastern Turkey, which date to the tenth millennium BCE.
They are enigmatic mainly because their builders left no writing. What we know comes from the buildings, the objects found in them and the human remains from the islands.
The temples themselves
The best-known sites are Ggantija on Gozo, and on Malta Hagar Qim, Mnajdra and Tarxien, along with several others. Several are protected as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The name Ggantija comes from the Maltese word for giants, reflecting a local folk tradition that a giantess built the monument. The story is legend, but it shows how impressive the stonework looked to later generations.
Most temples share a similar design: a series of rounded rooms, called apses, arranged around a central passage, often forming a clover-leaf or multi-lobed plan. Walls were built with large blocks of local limestone, some standing upright and others laid in courses, and some temples have a wide curved facade facing an open forecourt. Many rooms contained altars, stone benches, decorated slabs with spirals and animal figures, and holes or niches whose purpose is not certain. The roofs have not survived, and scholars debate how the interiors were covered, whether with timber, corbelled stone or other materials.
The builders had no metal tools. They worked the limestone with stone tools, and carried and raised the blocks using methods that probably included timber, rope and rollers. Some researchers have suggested that small stone balls found at several sites were used as bearings under heavy blocks, but this remains a hypothesis and is not proven.
Dating the temples
Dates come from radiocarbon dating of organic material and from the relative sequence of pottery styles. Archaeologists have long divided the temple period into phases named after sites, such as Ggantija, Saflieni and Tarxien, using pottery seriation to place deposits in order. Radiocarbon results have refined and in places revised the older scheme, but the broad outline has held up: building began in the fourth millennium BCE and reached its most elaborate forms in the Tarxien phase, before the temple tradition ended around the middle of the third millennium BCE.
An underground companion
The Hal Saflieni Hypogeum on Malta is a multi-level underground complex cut into the rock, used partly as a burial place over many centuries. The remains of a very large number of individuals, certainly thousands, were found there in early excavations, though they were not recorded as carefully as modern standards demand. Its carved chambers imitate the shapes of the surface temples, suggesting that ritual and burial were closely linked. Among the objects associated with the site is a small clay figure of a reclining person, often called the Sleeping Lady.
Who were the builders?
The first settlers reached the Maltese islands from Sicily, probably around 5900 BCE according to recent estimates, and brought farming, domestic animals and pottery. The temple builders were their descendants. Their culture shows links with Sicily and nearby islands, including the use of volcanic obsidian from islands such as Lipari and Pantelleria. Ancient DNA research on Maltese remains is still developing, but early results are consistent with ancestry from Sicily, and further studies will help to refine the picture.
Beyond that, little is known. We cannot say how many people lived on the islands, how society was organised, or whether the temples were run by priests, by specific groups or by the whole community. Estimates of the population are rough. The temples were large for a small island society, which has led to the suggestion that building them was a shared effort that strengthened community bonds, but that is an inference.
The statues and the “goddess” question
Several temples have yielded stone statues of large, rounded human figures, some of them seated and some with pleated skirts. Early scholars read them as images of a mother goddess or fertility deity. Others have pointed out that the figures often lack clear sex markers, and that the idea of a single great goddess is partly a modern construction. The statues may represent ancestors, deities, priests or something else. Without written records, the question cannot be settled.
Animal bones, pottery and carved altars suggest offerings and feasting. There are also carvings of bulls, goats and pigs on stone slabs. These point to ritual, but no reliable detailed account of Maltese temple religion can be given.
Why did it end?
The temple tradition seems to have stopped around 2500 BCE. The following Bronze Age phase, sometimes called the Tarxien Cemetery culture after burials found within the old temple site, shows different pottery, cremation burial and a different way of using space. There is no good evidence of invasion or a sudden catastrophe. Proposals include climate change and drought, soil erosion and declining farm yields on a small island, social stress, or a gradual change of belief. Some or all of these may have played a part, and none is firmly established.
Later peoples on the islands included the Phoenicians, traders from the Levantine Phoenician city-states who settled in the central Mediterranean in the first millennium BCE. By then the temples were ancient ruins. Many centuries later, the Minoan civilization of Crete had come and gone as well, which gives a sense of how far back the Maltese sites reach.
Visiting and preserving the sites
Some temples have been given protective covers or shelters to slow weathering, as the soft limestone erodes. Visitors can see the carved spirals at Tarxien, the large stones at Hagar Qim and the sweeping walls of Ggantija. Conservation, rather than new discovery, is now a major focus.