AMYDON-EXETER CENTRE 113

Menorca has an area of 258 square miles and a population of about 65,000 (about 252 per square mile). Malta and Gozo have an area of 95 and 26 square miles respectively, with populations of about 355,000 and 30,000 (about 3,737 and 1,154 per square mile) respectively. Hence, Menorca's population density is about 22% that of Gozo, and less than about 7% that of Malta.

Several significant connections between Joseph S. Ellul's account of various surviving prehistoric remains on Gozo and Malta and Peter Hochsieder & Doris Knösel's more recent and fascinatingly detailed studies of all thirty-one of Menorca's talayotic taulas, notably from an archeoastronomical point of view, are worthy of note.

Malta's foremost archæologist, Professor Sir Themistocles Zammit, states that the Phœnicians' colonisation of the Western Mediterranean generally and of Gozo and Malta in particular did not begin "before the 18th dynasty of Egypt at the earliest, and possibly not until the 15th century B.C." (Malta, 3rd edition, pp. 17-18), but that both islands' megalithic remains are all certainly of much earlier date, as too, perhaps, are some of the many still surviving rock-cut tombs.

"According to the most widely accepted theory," he adds (op. cit., p.22), "the Mediterranean basin at the opening of the Neolithic age was the scene of successive migrations from some part of Asia Minor or Africa. Arabia is regarded by many as the cradle of the Mediterranean Race and, in the opinion of Professor Myres, it nurtured not only a type of man but a family of languages... languages differing among themselves as Hebrew, Aramean, Maltese and Arabic, yet all springing from one common root." At its root, therefore, Maltese is a pre-Phœnician language.

Mallorca, Ibiza and Formentera all fall far behind Menorca in archæological importance, this latter island having more than 1,600 surviving prehistoric monuments, many of them being either caves cut out of limestone more than 5,000 years ago or natural caverns similarly used for human habitation then and subsequently. However, Menorca's main claim to archæological pre-eminence in the Balearics are the many talayots, taules and navetas erected there, quite independently of any cave settlements, at some time between 2,000 and 800 B.C.

Without denying the likely truth of the widely held view that all or most of Menorca's early cave-dwellers immigrated from what is now Southern France round about 5,000 B.C., it may also be the case that those later settlers who created the navetas, taules and talayots were, in fact, direct descendants of Neolithic Maltese and Gozitans…

That, at any rate, seems to me a probable explanation for the existence of "cart-ruts" on all three islands, as well as for several other striking similarities in building styles and techniques.

Thus, Peter Hochsieder & Doris Knösel have already drawn attention to the existence of taula-like structures at both ĦaÄ¡ar Qim and Mnajdra on Malta, as well as to the very similar shapes of two circular stone-paved hearths - one at Ä gantija (Gozo), the other at Binisafullet (Menorca). Clearly, further comparative field-studies are more than justified; international cooperation of this sort has much to recommend it.

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