Mnajdra: the Upper Temples

The upper temple, three rounded chambers off one doorway, is the oldest and the simplest plan on the islands, probably what every temple looked like before ambition set in. The middle temple, built on a raised platform, is the youngest, from the last phase of the temple period. The site was altered and added to for roughly as long as the span from the Norman conquest of England to today.

A slab in the upper temple carries rows of drilled holes read by some as a tally or calendar of days or moons, by others as decoration. The holes are there; the arithmetic is ours.

One night, people came onto the site with tools and toppled about sixty megaliths in the south and middle temples, breaking several: the worst deliberate damage to a prehistoric monument in the country’s history, almost certainly born of a local grievance over the site’s management rather than of anything about the temples. The stones were surveyed, lifted and reset within the year. The repairs show only to those who know where to look.

The fence, the wardens and the shelter date from what came after. Mnajdra had stood open on the hillside for five thousand years; one night ended that. A site this old survives by being looked after, and being looked after changes it.

Farmers. They grew wheat, barley and lentils, kept sheep, goats, cattle and pigs, made fine pottery and had no metal. Their tools were of stone, some of it imported: obsidian, the black volcanic glass, came by boat from Lipari and Pantelleria, and flint from Sicily.

How they were organised is not known. Building on this scale needed planning, labour and food set aside to feed the builders, and the temples have been read as the work of chiefs, of a priesthood, or of whole communities competing in stone. Houses of the period are scarce across the islands, and the people who built the temples are far less visible than what they built.

Around 2500 BC the building stopped, and the culture that had raised the temples for a thousand years drops out of the record. Why is argued over: drought, exhausted soil, famine, disease and newcomers have all been proposed, singly and together, and none has been proved.

The people who came next were different in almost every way that shows. They used metal, made different pottery and cremated their dead, and at Tarxien they placed their cemetery in the ruins of the temple. Whether anyone of the temple culture was left to meet them is one of the open questions of Maltese prehistory.