AMYDON-EXETER CENTRE 113

Individual Meetings & Group Encounters When The Time Is Right: Uncover, Recover, Discover Personal Creativity

Self-Education - Career Guidance - Holistic Psychotherapy - Diet - Transpersonal Meanings & Values - Body-Work

MALTA'S PREDILUVIAN CULTURE AT THE STONE-AGE TEMPLES

WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO ĦAÄ AR QIM

GĦAR DALAM, CART-RUTS, IL-MISQA, IL-MAQLUBA

&

CREATION

_{© JOSEPH S. ELLUL 1988
Augmented with new material by the author - 2004.}

THE NAME

From what has just been said, one may form an idea of how the place looked before the excavation: a hillock of arable soil with clusters of pillars of rock jutting up at frequent intervals. This appearance earned for the place the name of "Ħaġar Imqajjem", which means "Standing or Upright Stones" (Ħaġar = stones; imqajjem= upright. The j in Maltese has the sound of y in English).

Then, through the centuries, the word "imqajjem" dropped its "e" and changed to "Mqajm", and then later - and quite naturally - dropped the initial "M" and became "Qajm". To this day some nearby village people still call it "Ħaġar Qajm"; other village people refer to it as "Ħaġar Qejm". Townsfolk, however, write "Ħaġar Qim".

Hence, instead of ĦAÄ AR IMQAJJEM one now writes ĦAÄ AR QIM.

[Editor's note:Luigi Maria Ugolini suggests that the expression "Ħaġar Qim" actual means "Stones actively engaged in prayer" - an upright posture of the body has often been associated with ritual prayer.]

In the year 1839 an officer of the Royal Engineers, Mr. J. C. Vance, was entrusted with the task of excavating and presenting a plan of the ruins. Within a couple of months he had executed his duty and presented the government with the findings: statuettes,an engraved slab, two clay figurines (one of which has since disappeared) and a monstrous skull..

[Editor's note: By "the findings" our author is referring to those finds which local people engaged in the excavations passed on to Mr. Vance when he made his usual and rather perfunctory visit to the site round about 6 p.m. Sometimes, of course, one or two especially splendid items might earlier in the day have found a home in nearby Qrendi - and rumour has it that a few such treasures survive to this day.]

But unfortunately, Mr Vance made no detailed report of what was found, where it was found and in what position. A lot of the "rubbish" discarded in heaps outside the ruins was, in fact, precious material that would have provided much needed data about the temple. Consequently, very little may on this basis be said about Ħaġar Qim. Sometimes, however, when written history is lacking, tradition comes to the rescue.

It happens that the author is a direct descendant of the farmer who cultivated the fields above and around Ħaġar Qim at the time of their excavation. This farmer was also a member of the excavating team, and he subsequently became the first caretaker of the ruins, as the fields immediately around it were under his care. Since then the job of caretaker, and with it a lot of information has been passed on from father to son through four generations.

The Ħaġar Qim complex consists of the main temple, an older but smaller temple and two separate groups of dwelling-houses. The main temple is composed of SEVEN chambers (A, B, C, E, F, H, I - Pic.3), while the older but smaller one was made up of SEVEN apses (T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z). In the main temple were originally discovered SEVEN statuettes of upper coralline limestone about 12 inches large (Pic.4 and Pic.5; also Pic.6 and Pic.7). In Room A where these statuettes were found can be seen SEVEN altars or rather bases for these statuettes, some decorated with pit-holes or burned by the fire of the sacrifices.

In Room F, considered as the Stable, could be found SEVEN rope-holes where the people of those days could tie up SEVEN animals and have them always ready to be sacrificed in front of their gods.

Those people also had a reservoir for the water they needed. In a single small area of almost flat rock on the top of a ridge equidistant from Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra they dug SEVEN wells or water-tanks, five of which still hold water. This place is known today as "Il-Misqa" (The Drinking Trough - Pic.51).

During further excavations in the 1950's another set of statuettes, copies of the former ones but made of Globigerina Limestone, was discovered. This set also consisted of SEVEN items (Pic.12 and Pic.14).

It would be almost impossible to imagine that all these sevens are just a coincidence. Besides, there is a reason for the seven. It is quite sure that those early people had a great respect, if not adoration, for the Sun and the Moon and so, perhaps, for the five commonly visible planets. What particular respect they had for the Sun and the Moon will be shown later.

Now, when a lunar cycle of 29 days is divided into 4 parts, the resulting periods each contain SEVEN days. No wonder, then, that those people established the number seven as their 'Holy' number. Those people were, it seems, the forerunners of another people who are known to have regarded the number SEVEN as profoundly sacred -

To start with, there are the Seven periods of Creation which have led to our week of Seven Days. In Revelation (4:5) it stands written: "And there are Seven lamps burning before the throne, which are the Seven Spirits of God." The scroll sealed with Seven seals (4:6). A Lamb having Seven horns and Seven Eyes, which are the Seven Spirits of God.

In Maltese the saying goes that "The cat has seven souls" or "That fellow has seven souls" for anybody who often escapes being killed. Erich Von Däniken has compiled a long list of instances of the number Seven having been used as sacred at least since the time of the Great Flood. The Babylonians believed their cosmic order comprised Seven heavenly bodies: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. There is, as already noted, the "Book of Seven Seals" in Revelation, the Seven Days of Grace in ancient Greece, the famous Seven Gates of Thebes, the Seven Wise Men and the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Also, when Von Däniken visited the ruins of a very old temple in Peru which he considered to be a copy of the original temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, he noted that "all the stairways I had used had seven steps" and, in a sunken square, there was the "Altar of the SEVEN Goats".

This shows that the number Seven has always been a very holy number the whole world over.

Since the earliest days man must have had the greatest respect towards the Moon, a respect that was only second to that with which he regarded the Sun which gave him life and light throughout the day. The Moon with its ever-changing face supplemented that light during the night. These people will certainly have felt the effects of the Moon on every life on Earth, and so they must have considered it, too, as their god, a superior being upon which all their life somehow depended.

So, since the earliest prehistoric times man watched all the details of the antics of the Moon in the sky, noting its dancing, its going up and down, always changing its trajectory over a period of several years. They noted the antics of the Moon so accurately that they built the main doorways of their temples facing exactly towards the points at which the Moon arrives in its farthest travels to the South or to the North, the points which today we call the North and South Major Standstills of the Moon. (Pic.36).

But that is not all. They also arranged other doors so that they were facing such other most important points as the positions of the Sun at the Equinox and at the Solstices.

In the explanation that follows, the degrees of declination show the angle subtended between the point mentioned and a line running from East to West at the point of observation. If a specific position is to the North it is marked as positive, while if to the South it is considered negative. This means that the declinations of the Sun's Solstices in Malta are:

The declinations of the position of the Moon at its Major Standstill as observed from Malta are:

[In Stonehenge, U.K., the Summer Solstice rising is 40#186; North of East 90#186;.] These degrees are for the horizon at sea-level and for a higher horizon there will be some degrees' difference.

The following list shows that those early people had a whole calendar in mind, as is clear from the variety of specific directions in which they set their doorways.

As a matter of fact the temple of Ħaġar Qim was planned so that its outside and even its inside entrances are aligned towards some important position in the rising or setting either of the Sun, or else of the Moon when in one of its Major Standstill positions.

To be more precise, at Ħaġar Qim the main entrance faces the rising of the Full Moon at its Major Standstill position (Pic.36). The back door opposite the Main Entrance faces the direction of the setting of the Full Moon when at the northern limits of its Major Standstill.

The outside entrance of Room H faces directly to the West. The doorway as it is now may not be in the exact position, because this is a reconstructed doorway which is not in its proper position. From the original doorway they could watch a marking-stone they had placed near the horizon to provide for the exact pin-pointing of the Sun at its Equinox position. Such a marking-stone still exists just below the horizon at the point of the rising Sun at the Equinox, as this is observed from the Main Entrance of the lower Temple of Mnajdra (Pic.37 and Pic.39).

[Webmaster-Editor's note:In his paper, "The Sun Temple of Mnajdra", RILKO-member John E. Palmer of The Hague also mentions having identified on the rocky hill above Mnajdra these two stones which served as "true foresights" for the Equinox and Winter Solstice sightings of the Sun. The Equinox foresight stone was in excellent condition when I inspected it for myself towards the end of 2000 but, at some date prior to 27 March 2001, it was, I am very sorry to say, professionally and quite deliberately vandalized by someone equipped with a portable, electric, mason's drill - not, therefore, "by a tourist"...]

There is nothing imaginary about our identification of this stone, because they also had another similar one, of the same form and size, which served to mark the rising Sun at the winter Solstice. The Equinox stone is almost square, 38" × 39", with its longer line pointing towards Mnajdra and the part facing Mnajdra worked flat. It stands 1½' high above ground-level, and is slightly dome-shaped. The Solstice stone is almost round, with a diameter of 39", but is otherwise of the same shape. Surely this did not happen by chance, and they certainly also had their Summer Solstice marker, too, although this latter has not yet been discovered, probably because, supposing it still exists, it is now somewhere on partly cultivated land, where there are lots of rubble walls. All this certainly proves how much attention they paid to taking care of their calendric directions (Pic.40).

These pin-pointed directions towards the rising or setting of the Sun at the Equinox or Solstice, and not forgetting the Moon's Major Standstill positions, still hold perfectly good after a period of at least 8,000 years. This proves that the rotating and inclination positions of the Earth in relation to the Sun have not changed throughout that long period of time.

[Webmaster-Editor's note: Maurice Chatelain, who thinks in terms of much longer periods, would remind us that the ancients' well-founded traditional belief in the precession of the Equinox is not about changes in the Earth's inclination relative to the Sun, but about relatively constant, long-term, cyclic changes, consequent upon its own inclination relative to the galactic north-pole, of our entire solar-system relative to the Zodiac. As he writes in Our Cosmic Ancestors (p. 7):

"There are many megalithic computers around the world, like Stonehenge and the Medicine Wheel of Wyoming. They all indicate a fantastic astronomical knowlede which could only have been obtained after tens of millennia of observations and recordings, or by the intervention of astronauts from another civilization from another world in outer space.

The Earth had three different moons in the past before the present one. The last moon was much larger and much closer than ours, which resulted in a huge tidal belt around the equator as well as frequent eclipses, lunar years of 264 days and solar years of 288 days.

The same numbers 264 and 288 were found in the dimensions of the Tower of Babel whose volume was 1/6 of that of the Great Pyramid and six times that of the Ziggurat of Ur in Mesopotamia."

None of this is meant to belittle the importance of Malta. According to Professor Ugolini Malta's megalithic remains are of more recent date than some paleolithic relics surviving in France and Spain, but they are all much earlier than anything found in Crete or the Aegean - even though it is true that a few neolithic items came to light underneath some houses at Knossos before any similar remains had actually been unearthed in either Malta or Gozo. Ugolini was, of course, familiar with Evans's work in Crete, just as he was familiar with the Italian Archæological Mission's most important work on the same island. Incidentally, excavations began at Ä gantija on Gozo in 1827 - these, therefore, preceded those in Crete by several decades, but, sadly, the findings there have been largely ignored or misunderstood.]

Inside ĦaÄ¡ar Qim there is a chapel whose floor is about 3 feet higher than that in the rest of the temple. This room, marked E, has its entrance directly facing the spot where the Sun sets behind the hill at the Summer Solstice. The declination of the entrance is 27º instead of 29º because of the high horizon behind which the Sun here sets (Pic.29).

At the back of this chapel there was a high opening or window (Pic.7) through which one could observe the rising Sun at the Winter Solstice.

Those people certainly had a very good reason to take the trouble to raise up the floor of this chapel to a level 3 feet higher than that of the floor in the rest of the temple. Their reason was that, in order to be able to watch the setting Sun at the Summer Solstice on the top of that hill, they needed to be higher than the roof of Room I, only over the top of which would they be able to watch the Sun set.

The entrance to Room I at the back of the temple faces directly North, but at the back of the chapel there are two decorated altars flanking a recess.[ If one examines minutely this recess, one notices that the stones that block it do not fit perfectly. This is because, originally, this recess served as a passage from this Room I into Room H, which originally formed part of the second temple. Hence, since Room I faces North, the right-hand side opening of this back-chapel must have faced directly towards the setting sun, in the West.]

It happens that opposite to the North there is the South, at which point there is also the Sun at mid-day. At this time the Sun is high, and it had to be observed through the roof, most probably through a hole through which they will have taken note of the position of the Sun's rays at both its highest and lowest trajectories. If those people had the ability to mark the difficult calendric points previously mentioned, it will be quite obvious that they could also make use of this easy procedure.

Ħaġar Qim isn't the only calendric temple. In fact, all the other important temples are similarly calendric, and I provide some indications of this here. The Upper Entrance of Mnajdra points to the rising Moon at its Major Standstill, while the Lower Entrance marks, with the help of a marking-stone (Pic.37 and Pic.39 and also Pic.40), the exact positions of the rising Sun at its Equinox and at its Summer and Winter Solstices, as previously explained. Others interested in these matters [including John E. Palmer] have also discovered that the diagonals of the doorway also mark the Solstices.

The floor of Mnajdra's Lower Temple also displays a design in the form of an isoceles triangle. Just inside the entrance of this lower temple, the threshold slab is cracked in two straight lines forming an exact isoceles triangle with its base towards the outside of the temple. Someone has argued that this crack was caused by a big stone falling down on to this slab. This cannot have been the case, because this slab, far from being depressed as a result of such a fall, bulges up slightly at the points where the cracks meet. This is clearly the result of deliberate planning, the purpose intended and achieved being that these cracks should leave an open and visible gap, as in fact they do (Pic.38).

Someone else has suggested that this triangle, which actually measures 35" × 38" × 38", has preserved for us the exact length of "1 prehistoric yard"! When I examined this triangle on paper as well as on the spot, I discovered that the angle at its apex is one of 56º, which is the angle subtended by the Solstices of the Sun. The Azimuth or compass-direction of the lines is 62º and 118º respectively, which corresponds with the declination of the Solstices: 28º North and 28º South of East, 90º.

These facts clearly show that this Mnajdra Temple was purposely constructed by the ancient temple-builders to mark the direction of the rising of the Sun, in whose honour this entrance was erected, at its Summer and Winter Solstices. Yet, from the apex of this triangle one cannot see the positions of either of the Solstices' risings of the Sun. So, this triangle could not have marked the actual point of observation; it is instead a sacred triangle placed there in honour of the movements of one of their principal gods, the Sun.

Those especially interested and proficient in the science and art of measurements continue to argue in favour of a "prehistoric yard", and I am not in principle opposed to that opinion. The "primitives" of those days undoubtedly possessed great knowledge about which we know very little. A large question then arises: as regards this Mnajdra Triangle, which organising idea came first - directions or measurement? Perhaps the answer to this question is the same, like that to the question about "the Hen and the Egg"? [Editor's note: J. S. Ellul believes that "the Hen" came "first" - and he is prepared to argue vigorously in favour of this opinion...]

The Ä gantija Temples in Gozo also have two entrances marking the rising of the Summer Full Moon at its Major Standstill.

The Tarxien Temples have the inner-temple entrance facing the setting of the Summer Full Moon at its Major Standstill, while the back view, obviously, similarly marks the rising of the Winter Full Moon at its Major Standstill.

The small temple of Ta' Ħaġrat also has its main entrance pointing to the rising Full Moon at its Major Summer Standstill.

Certainly, no one could say that the building of all these entrances in the direction of all these different calendric positions was no more than a coincidence.

From all that has been said above, we can see that those early people were able to know the longest and shortest days by marking the Solstices of the Sun and then also marking the Equinox. Certain individuals pretend that because those people had no clocks, no protractors with which to divide an angle, and no theodolite with which to measure angles, they could not divide the space between the Solstices. These modern people pretend that any such bisection will have been utterly out of the question for the ancients, and that it was "almost impossible for the temple-builders to find the Equinox position". They are forgetting that those people could count even by marking notches on sticks or plates, then splitting the number of notches into two equal parts (without needing to use a Siemens calculator), and then, by counting the days from the Solstice of that half-period, those "primitive" people could mark on the horizon (or just below it) the position of the rising Sun at the Equinox. From this one can see that only the "wise" people of today need to employ a protractor or a theodolite in order to divide a practical angle exactly in two…

So, it was not difficult for those not-so-primitive people to mark the most important points in the Sun's positions - the Summer and Winter Solstices and the Equinox. I think that their most difficult or rather their more time-consuming task was that of marking the Major Standstills of the Moon, simply because they always had to wait for another eighteen years to pass in order to mark again and check on these particular points. However, time will surely not have been a problem for those people. They had plenty of it.

So, having established these calendric points of the Sun and Moon, they set about building their temples in honour of these deities and made their entrances face directly towards the rising or setting of their gods.

From this we can see that those prediluvian ancient people were very religious, and that they showed outwardly that they greatly respected and honoured the Supreme Being, who was still unknown to them, but Whom they tried to personify in the Sun, in the Moon and in such other figures as represented that Almighty Being they felt certainly must exist.

In the table above, one has to note that certain degrees do not correspond exactly to the proper direction. This is not a mistake, but is because the horizon is higher than sea-level. In the chapel at higher level at ĦaÄ¡ar Qim the degrees are not 29º but 27º, because the Sun sets behind a high hill. Also, in the chapel facing West, the present entrance is not the original one, but a recent reconstruction.

Malta has a unique Neolithic heritage. The temples found in Malta are nowhere else to be found, and the articles found in other parts of Europe have little or no relation to their Maltese counterparts. In fact, Professor of Archæology Doctor Vere Gordon Childe in Chapter XIV of his book The Dawn of European Civilization, entitled "Island Civilizations in the Western Mediterranean", in a section dealing with "The Megalithic Civilization of Malta", states that "Malta made no further contribution to European culture. In fact, it was only during Period 1 (Northern Neolithic or Early Neolithic) that the island culture was ORIGINAL and CREATIVE. Even then its contributions to the European heritage can only have been IMMATERIAL, and may well have been ILLUSORY" [emphasis added].

This shows that during this period the Maltese civilization was singular and inventive, showing that its works were not found anywhere else. Professor Childe goes so far as to say that any resemblance between the Maltese and the European heritages is IMMATERIAL and even IMAGINARY.

That the Professor is of this opinion is not to be wondered at. The huge statue and the large statuettes found in two of the Maltese temples emphasise this idea, because all the Neolithic figures that have been found anywhere else measure less than 15 centimetres, while the Malta statuettes measure about 30 centimetres and the huge statue would have stood 2.4 metres high when whole, as only its lower half has survived.

[Webmaster-Editor's note: According to Professor Ugolini, only the Maltese megalithic temples are truly neolithic; as a rule, any surviving non-Maltese megalithic structures date back only to the bronze age. Cf. Malta..., p.248.]

The origin of these statues is very interesting and, at the same time, complicated.

[Webmaster-Editor's note: No reliance can be placed on the facile suggestion about "twinning" that may be read on the related "explanatory" card currently displayed alongside some of these statues in the National Museum of Archæology in Valletta.]

There were two sets of statuettes - seven in each set. They were all found inside the oldest of the Megalithic Temples, the Temple of ĦaÄ¡ar Qim. The set discovered in the 1950's was the first of these two sets those Neolithic people had made. They are made of Globigerina Limestone, a soft stone used for the building of houses, and at a time when those people did not as yet possess any flint-stone tools. These statues were used in the small older temple and went out of use when the main temple was built. Witness to this fact is that three of them were found buried under the raised pavement near a set of four large steps that served to climb into the higher chapel, stone-slab steps measuring between 6 and 8 feet long and more than 1 foot wide. Two other statues were found in one of the heaps of rubble stones removed from the temple during its first excavation in 1839. These five statues (Pic.14) are now kept in the Valletta Museum of Archæology, but another two (Pic.12) are still at ĦaÄ¡ar Qim, where they are used as stone in the western wall; when still erect, these statues faced the inside of that wall, and so they could not be seen by those people. Effectively, these seven statues had all been buried, but with respect.

The other set, which came to light during the first excavations in 1839, is made of a harder type of stone, used mostly in the surfacing of roads, and known as Upper Coralline Limestone. This set was made for the main temple and, by the time it was built, they had already discovered flint. According to tradition these statues were found in chapel A (Pic.15 and Pic.16, also Pic.17 and Pic.18).

The general form of the statuettes is that of a human being. But some parts of the body are very much exaggerated in size. The disproportionately large parts are the muscles of the arms, thighs and legs. The remainder of the body is, proportionally, of normal size. The chest is flat in each of these seven statuettes, and there is no sign of any female breast. These facts are so clear that the world-renowned archæologist Sir Themistocles Zammit, who was also a Professor of Medicine, classified these statuettes as representing the MALE SEX. Under one of these statuettes, when they were first displayed in the Archæological Museum within the Auberge d'Italie in Valletta, he placed a white card with an inscription, the relevant part of which reads: "HEADLESS STATUETTE REPRESENTING A STANDING NAKED FIGURE OF MALE SEX" (Pic.17).

Nevertheless, after the 1940's certain foreign archæologists visiting Malta came up with the novel and preposterous idea that these statues represented the female sex, and to make this notion even more sensational they stated that these statues represented the "Goddess of Fertility" and the "Mother Goddess".

One cannot easily understand how they arrived at this idea, since these statues are neither fat around the belly nor do they possess any hanging breasts. The temple-builders certainly knew full well how to represent the figure of a woman with a pair of motherly, full and hanging breasts, as shown in the small statue, of about 15 centimetres when whole, that was also found at Ħaġar Qim, and is now known as the "Venus of Malta" (Pic.19). This small statue is made of baked clay, as is also the still smaller "Sleeping Woman" (Pic.20) found at the Hypogeum. This sleeping figure is clearly that of a female, because it sports a pair of protruding breasts beneath her folded arms. But none, and I repeat, none of these stone statuettes possess any semblance of a protruding breast.

[Webmaster-Editor's note: Some enthusiastic defenders of this alleged cult of a "Mother Goddess" would, therefore, do well to heed L. M. Ugolini's incisive comment: "Il greve e veridico piccone dello scavatore protestò contro alcune penne di facile maneggio e abituate a dimostrare da comodi tavoli di una biblioteca." (op. cit., p. 236.)]

And who is this "Mother Goddess"? According to Doctor Vere Gordon Childe, Professor of Archæology in the University of London: "At Troy, the 'Mother Goddess' (if such she be) was represented on a more monumental scale - an owl-like visage had been carved in low relief on a stone slab, 1.27 metres high, that was found standing just outside the city-gate." From this one can see that even Professor Childe had his doubts about the title "Mother Goddess".

[Webmaster-Editor's note: In The Dawn of European Civilization V. Gordon Childe characterizes early European culture as being both "peaceful" and "democratic" and without any "chiefs concentrating the communities' wealth" but later, he says, the previously prevalent female figurines are no longer in evidence, metal weapons are fashioned and used, settlements are fortified and warfare is normal. He concludes that "The old ideology has been changed. That may," he suggests, "reflect a change from a matrilineal to patrilineal organization of society." (op. cit., pp. 109, 119, 123.) Chapter IV of Dale N. Robertson's The Biblical Ciphers Unsealed - A Revival of the Hebrew Goddess includes a generally helpful overview of present thinking about this, but neither Gordon Childe nor any of the other authors cited seem to have noticed that the matrilineal organization which patrilineal organization displaced was itself a far from peaceful and relatively recent development (the so called Age of Ishtar: c. 3100-1600 B.C.) out of an earlier, long established and more gender-egalitarian family tradition.]

Some people are still imbued with the idea that the skirt makes the woman. Because they have seen the lower part of the huge statue at the Tarxien Temples wearing a skirt, they have the impression that it represents a woman. According to this opinion the Roman Legions were all manned by women soldiers. They have failed to realise that slacks are a comparatively modern contraption.

J. D. Evans states on page 142 of his book, Malta, that "A further characteristic which all these figures have in common is that they lack all sexual characteristics male or female." He adds that "where sexual characteristics are shown on these, either in Malta or abroad, they are normally feminine. Their complete absence on the more developed types of Maltese cult-statuettes may imply that the being represented came to be regarded as asexual."

However, although God and the angels have no sex, they are always considered as masculine, and nobody considers them as females - unless they are mythological goddesses represented with the female bust.

Yet, on his page 117, Evans refers to the "colossal statue" (Pic.21) in the Tarxien Temples as "the Maltese fertility deity", and it is this term which has been developed into "the goddess of fertility". If, in Evans' own words, these statues represent "asexual idols", how can they be identified as female goddesses of fertility? Nevertheless, this notion of "the goddess of fertility" has now become firmly fixed in many minds.

As I mentioned above, these statuettes do have some parts of their bodies which are very much exaggerated in size. Perhaps this has led some people to associate being fat with being a woman. If fat arms and fat legs were female attributes, then most weight-lifters would have to be women. But many weight-lifters are he-men with great power in their arms and legs. And power is what these statuettes are trying to express, but not that of weight-lifters.

These statuettes with arms, thighs and calves represented as of a greatly exaggerated size, represent someone who is extremely powerful in the arms - so much so, that He can do prodigious things; and He is so strong in the legs, that He can be everywhere in no time! Those not-so-primitive people understood for a certainty that their unknown God was an Almighty Being, whom they, therefore, represented with muscles such that, notwithstanding all the muscle-strength these temple-builders had necessarily themselves already developed, this Being clearly possessed muscles that were much bigger and fatter than their own… That is why these statuettes are so fat, and not because they represent some archæologist's idea of "femininity"!

There is another very interesting idea about the Stone-Age statues. At Ħaġar Qim, the earliest of these Megalithic Temples, those people gave homage to Seven different gods represented by these Seven statuettes. At Tarxien, which is considered to be the latest of these temples, those people had ONLY ONE statue. This one statue, however, is a giant one with extremely fat legs and, surely, its missing upper half will have had extremely fat arms. This certainly shows that those people were by that time representing their deity as one single being, but One much bigger and more powerful than the other Seven put together!

This may have been the first notion among pagans that the All-Mighty Being must be a single One. The Almighty One certainly has his ways to lead humanity towards His Truth, if that humanity is really sincere.

- Shalom & Welcome! -

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