Ħaġar Qim: the Façade

Ħaġar is stone in Maltese; Qim is read either as an old word for standing or as a corruption of one for veneration. The temple was one of the first on the islands to be excavated, in 1839, by a British officer with a party of soldiers, who found a building that had stood half buried for five and a half thousand years.

The largest slab in the outer wall is over six metres long and weighs about twenty tonnes. Round stone balls found at several temples suggest rollers; levers, ropes and a great many people did the rest. No one has demonstrated the method. The stone is there regardless.

The ridge is globigerina limestone, the soft golden stone of all Maltese building, which cuts well and weathers badly. By the 1990s five thousand years of sun, salt and rain were taking the surface off in flakes. The shelter went up in 2009 to stop it, and does.

From the centre it is a short, level walk to the temple, and the shelter announces it long before the stones do. Under it a marked route leads to the façade and on into the building, and ropes show where it stops. The stones are not to be climbed, sat on or touched: five thousand years of weather are one thing, the hands of every visitor another.

The shelter changes the visit as well as the stone. Everything is seen in even shade instead of the glare of the open ridge, which is kinder to photographs and to anyone standing still to listen, and the sides are open, so the wind and the view stay. With Mnajdra’s, it is the only shade on the site outside the centre.

The soldiers who cleared Ħaġar Qim in 1839 were after the building and whatever was in it. The earth they carted away held, layer by layer, the evidence for how the rooms were used, and very little of it was recorded. Much of what cannot be said about Ħaġar Qim cannot be said for that reason; the detail in the story of the temples comes mostly from later, more careful digs elsewhere.

Stone cannot be dated directly. The dates come from the pottery found in the temples, whose styles change through the period and divide it into phases named after sites — Ġgantija, Saflieni, Tarxien — and from radiocarbon readings on charcoal and bone from excavations across the islands, which fix those phases in years. On that evidence Ħaġar Qim was begun in the earlier part of the temple period and built on for centuries afterwards.

For comparison, the great stone circle at Stonehenge was raised at about the time the Maltese temples went out of use. When its sarsens went up in Wiltshire, the oldest parts of this building had been standing for many centuries.