Ħaġar Qim: the Chambers

A central corridor with rounded chambers opening off it in pairs, like the lobes of a clover leaf, is the idea behind every temple on the islands. Ħaġar Qim has more of these chambers, added at more angles over several centuries, than any other. It reads less as a building than as an accumulation.

The pillar altar carved with a plant growing from a pot, and the group of small stone figures with vast thighs, tiny hands and feet and socketed necks for interchangeable heads, both came from these rooms and are now in the National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta. Fertility figures, goddesses, ancestors: every reading has been offered. The same figures occur at every temple, so whatever they meant was agreed across the islands.

Low in the outer wall of one of the chambers is a small elliptical hole cut through the stone. At dawn on the summer solstice the first light passes through it onto a slab across the room. It is not erosion; someone cut it on the longest day, four thousand years before Christ.

The originals are in the National Museum of Archaeology, in the Auberge de Provence on Republic Street in Valletta, which has its own ticket. The figures from these rooms are smaller than most people expect, and they are shown with finds from the other temples, so the comparison between sites can be made in one visit. Seen first, they fill these empty chambers; seen afterwards, the chambers explain them.

Two of the best-known pieces in the museum are sometimes assumed to come from here and do not. The Sleeping Lady, a small terracotta of a woman asleep on a couch, is from the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, and the lower half of a colossal standing figure is from Tarxien. Ħaġar Qim’s own best-known pieces are the group of fat figures and a small terracotta nude known as the Venus of Malta.

The fat figures are often called goddesses or mother goddesses, and they carry most of the weight of the idea that the temples served a female deity. Look closely and most of them show no clear sign of sex at all: heavy, smooth bodies, folds of flesh, nothing that settles the question. A few figures from the temples are plainly female, the Venus of Malta among them; the large seated and standing figures mostly are not.

That leaves every reading open. They may be women, men, neither, or a body deliberately left unspecified; the fatness may stand for plenty, for rank or for something with no modern equivalent. The word goddess is a modern one, and as much a guess as the word temple.