Seven Temples on Malta: Red Skorba Ta' Hagrat Mgarr Kordin III Ggantija Hagar Qim Mnajdra Tarxien A Walking Tour The Sympathetic History of the Stones
Betsy Ross-Edison Ph. D.
Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
2017
nidottu
SEVEN TEMPLES ON MALTA presents A Walking Tour of ancient stone circles built by rolling megaliths on carved stone balls to form the great structures. Called 'temples' by the early archaeologists, this name has remained in use as 50 temples were discovered and excavated on the small island of Malta and adjoining Gozo. Every temple was built near an underground tomb. But why? The seven temples toured in this book are each designated UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE sites. Yet, even though so many visitors have now walked inside these empty stone sites, built in a preliterate age some 5,000 years ago, no one to this day knows how the structures were used; there is no written history about the great stone circles. This book tries to remedy that. It presents a sampling of the great profusion of intact pottery and fragments of pottery, the sherds found in every temple, 20,000 sherds found in one temple alone. An imagined scenario is also presented explaining how the temple pottery was used. The reader is ultimately invited to attend a feast "One Ancient Evening" with the ancients inside Hagar Qim temple which was built high on a clifftop by the sea. There it becomes apparent that the great stone circles were built for the broken-hearted.
