Prehistoric Malta | The Incredible Archaeology Museum is Mind-Blowing | Megalithomania

So this is it, this is Valletta Archaeology Museum, the National Museum of Malta. It's just like a masterpiece of ancient art. These are just remarkable and it just shows you the level of sophistication these Neolithic builders had with the stone carving techniques. Look at this, it's tiny and yet the biggest clues as to what their temples may have actually looked like. One of the biggest mysteries of Malta, the cart ruts and this is the elongated skull room. Hey Megalithomaniacs, here we are at the Valletta Archaeology Museum in Malta and in here are some of the most astonishing stone artifacts and elongated skulls, cart rut information and much much more. So let's take a look around, I want to show you various aspects of what's in here and it's pretty amazing. So just at the entrance to the museum we actually have a pair of these beautiful massive quadruple spiral statues carved from solid limestone. What's interesting about these we have these kind of four spirals, we have like almost like kind of chevrons coming in from all different directions, we have a perfect circle in the middle and then at the base it would have been covered up with other blocks but we also have all the beautiful cut marks all over it as well. So these are just astonishing and it just makes you wonder who could have done these. We'll have a quick look at this one as well, it's almost like a mirror image and the fact that we're finding this style in so many different places suggests this symbolism, this cult was all over the world, especially all over Europe, although these are most similar to ones we actually see at Tiwanaku in the museum there. So let me know what you think, these are just absolutely amazing. Just look at the detail on that, it's just pristine, I'm amazed what good condition this is and then also at the entrance we have this one, absolutely astonishing. You can see how neat and tidy it is, if you look at it from this angle it's just like a masterpiece of ancient art in 3D relief as well. I mean this is not easy to create even with like this kind of quite firm tough limestone. Look at this, just the detail, it's absolutely beautiful. Now there's nothing apparently on the back of them but they they were carved like very flat on the back, they were like you know absolutely flat like polished almost, can't quite see it but you can see the way it's almost looks like it's polished here. There's so much to see here, so let's just get straight in and have a look. Also in the museum here they have the kind of era before the megaliths, the first farmers, the first people here. There's a big controversy about Neanderthals being here as well, found at this site, the Gardaland and all these artifacts which are super ancient and this was Anton Mifsud who did this research and we have some of these, these are from 5200 BC for instance, showing a very early phase of pottery going on here. So this is one of the megalithic pieces from Tartian, most of what we see here is from Tartian, these were often like slabs laying out in the front of temples, in the interior of temples almost like steps coming up either side. We have some beautiful carvings on these as well but what we're seeing here is something really megalithic. The detail on here actually is really interesting, you see all these little kind of dimples like mini cut marks and yet over here on this side we have all these beautiful animal carvings and spirals and other such things, so there's a real design spec that lasted for possibly one and a half thousand years using the same ideas, the same principles and the same design spec, you can even see that in the orientation of the sites. You can see all the beautiful detail all along it of the same stone, you can see this beautiful, very almost like abstract animals but it's like a kind of zigzag pattern. Then we have these kind of pillars here which would have held something upon them, possibly some kind of sacrament and then we have all these here all the way over here but what's really interesting is we actually have where they were found, the early photographs which is absolutely fascinating, so it shows you in quite good detail where they were actually found. So this is a Tarshan temple, it takes to 3150 BC and these are some of the stones here and if we just keep walking along again you can see the stone itself with the beautiful spirals and the location it was actually found in. Then we have this giant one, I have to step back for this, look at this, this is like, it's almost like Roman or something, absolutely massive. This would have been at the front of one of the interior spaces at Tarshan, you can see that here and here. Look at the detail on this, if we just get close up here, have a little look at this, they've even got a hole here that's carved right through, it comes out the other side there, all along here, look at the beautiful spirals. We'll just walk along here, I'll turn around, I'm not in the shadow but this is not dissimilar to what you might see at other places like Sardinia, even Tiwanaku in Bolivia, I mean there's a couple of statues I'll show you which look like they just came out of Tiwanaku but this is just immense. Then you have this top part kind of going along here like a kind of rim, like a window ledge. Now at the bottom we have the kind of holes, the small kind of cut marks combined with the symbolism of the spiral, absolutely astonishing. Then you have these indentations here as well which are very very interesting, so these are like kind of little ledges, see here, it's almost like a nub, not quite. Then these ones here, these are just remarkable and it just shows you the level of sophistication these Neolithic builders had with the stone carving techniques. Now obviously we know Tartian is 3150 BC officially, however much earlier dating has been put forward by Leni Rydzik in her book Sirius the start of the Maltese temples, who claims many of these temples go back to almost like the pre-pottery Neolithic era of Gobekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe and so forth. Even some of the styling is interesting, the orientations are the same, we even have enclosures that look like those at Gobekli Tepe as well as this kind of relief carving. I think this is absolutely classic this one, it's like a classic double spiral. These were found generally in the first apses, so the kind of entrances into the first temples, no one's sure exactly of their function. They were kind of placed in the museum in the 1950s due to the weathering, bad weathering that was taking place on them. Then we have again, we have the sort of classic spiral, then we have these very kind of abstract almost plant-like spirals. Again it shows you where it's found just there and this one here is really interesting, it's like multiple steps and you can see it's got like steps and each of the little steps also has carvings on it. So it's not just one, the main area, it's like every little detail has beautiful carvings on it. Back there we have the doorway, famous kind of Tuvanaku style doorway and below it yet more spirals. It's an amazing collection in here, I'm really quite blown away and this is mostly from Tarshan. We do have some from Bodjiba temple, we do have some from a few other sites we'll have a look at as well. Then we have these great bowls as well which are really interesting. These are like, people are unsure of their exact purpose but possibly for some kind of sacrament, possibly just to collect water for ceremonies. We do get these really early dates for Tarshan from Lenny Rydzik's research, we have anything from 9050 BC to 4850. So there's four different dates between these two eras that she gives for the temples although officially it's 3150 BC or thereabouts. So I find this fascinating because some of the earliest researchers here, some of the earliest archaeologists who were investigating these sites were giving these kind of dates just like Lenny now gives in her book The Cube. So these two beautiful pieces also come from Tarshan temple, they were found just inside the main entrance on the left and you can see the beautiful reliefs of animals all over these. Now it's suggested in this big border that there was evidence of human sacrifice which may well be the case but there's also almost like a tribal connection between different animal species at different temples which is similar to what we find at the Bekli Tepe and that may indeed be the case. We also have the cow represented there amongst other things, this is like a bovine on the right, this is like some kind of quadruped and here we have from Tarshan what looks like two bulls which is very interesting actually in a curvilinear motif. The two bull symbolism is what we find frequently at some of the Taztepala sites as well, even Chetolhoiak as well. So we're now going into the second room here, we have some very interesting pieces from Bujuba which is where the Dolmen hotel is, you actually have a temple inside the hotel somewhere we actually stay on our tours and here's a beautiful piece here again the classic style we find all over Malta with the spirals and much much more. We also have these stone spheres here which people suggest we use to transport and move the stones and it's interesting as well even though now Bujuba is completely surrounded by all the construction at St Paul's Bay it was just farmland with just ruins upon it when it was first discovered back in 1928. I personally find this one really fascinating because this is from Bujuba temple and it clearly has these fish carved on it, you can see the provenance of where it came from this is the part of the temple so it's near the main part of what is left. So some people have suggested because this was directly next to St Paul's Bay this may have been a fishing area hence the fish was almost like their totem, it was their kind of power animal it was what served them and what they traded with and so forth. This just shows you the one side of the beautiful kind of temenos stone entrance stone and then this just is the main fish pieces themselves absolutely beautiful for its time with all the kind of framing around the stone which always blows my mind about all these sites in Malta and Gozo. And so I find this intriguing this is starting to seem like different tribes different megalithic cultures all coming together and they had they kind of bred different animals over time and if we're going back to the time of the end of the ice age this is not long after agriculture really started developing in the fertile crescent and it may have reached Malta because at that time Malta was attached to Sicily there was land between them and so it could have been reached. So this is just one of the most amazing pieces there's not much left at Bujuba now as part of the hotel but it just shows you some of the beautiful pieces that have been found there and this just shows you actually another statue here that was also found there and the provenance of when it was discovered. So this is one of the mysterious altars that we find at many of the temples this one from Hagahim this is just inside the first temple in the first apse and people have questioned what it is whether it's like a variation of plants whether it's bullhorns stacked upon each other or whether it's something completely abstract but one thing we have noticed down at the bottom here you can actually see what looks like one of those kind of Sumerian bags or like what you see on pillar 43 at Gobekli Tepe as well. These as well down the front could which I believe actually represent ribs of a kind of an abstract human form with the bag at the bottom meaning something else. Now there's different interpretations about this so we're just speculating here but it seems like something would have been placed on top some kind of sacrament or possibly a statue of one of the goddess figures let me know what you think in the comments. So these are absolutely fascinating look at these so these are different variations actually on the temple models so we have a classic one here and it's kind of like and then you actually have one of the bases that we see a tarsier like a model of that another one here we have the famous minidra one up here and it just shows you that they were kind of creating models of their temples and how it would have looked so it gives us a clue to the actual style and one of the most interesting ones we'll see in a moment is a tiny little statue of a full temple from Tahagrat and this suggests and it shows gigantic trilithon doorways like you see in some of these but also massive lintels going across the top like it had a megalithic roof but these are just very interesting examples from various of the temple sites so this is the temple model from Tahagrat you can just see it in there you just see how small it is compared to my hand and it is tiny but this just shows you really interesting features look at this it's tiny just a few centimeters wide and yeah it's one of the clues the biggest clues as to what their temples may have actually looked like here we have some broken limestone a slab in five sections separated within size lines four of these sections have star-like incisions whereas the middle one has a semi-circular inclusion which could represent the moon this was found at Talakadi this is a ruin site not too far from Bujib or St Paul's Bay just inland a bit but what JJ has found is that she believes this could be an early representation of the movement of the stars along the golden gate of the ecliptic so this could be a very important kind of piece of the puzzle when it comes to the legacy of the Gobekli Tepe Builders because she's found the same style the same symbolism and the same golden gate of the ecliptic markings and carvings represented there very very clearly now more research needs to be done on this but I just wanted to show you this with good light on it so you can see the detail on it really really well I think this is one of the most important pieces it could prove to be the connection between Gobekli Tepe and the sites here in Malta of course this is one of the highlights of the museum here this is the sleeping lady from Halseflini Hypogeum here's some of the beautiful detail on it I also got a scan of it as well but yeah she's sleeping just on what looks like some kind of couch or bed full figured and there's still a debate about whether these are male or female so this is one of several found in the Hypogeum itself suggest there's some kind of ritualistic possibly even dream incubation ceremony is going on underground here in Malta we've got a couple of other examples of sleeping figures here from the Hypogeum these are a little bit more damaged and rough here but still show you that there's seems to be a thing going on in the Hypogeum there's a big debate about whether this was actually used not just for acoustics but actually for like dream incubation and oracle oracles where they would actually receive information in the dream state now we're starting to see some of the gigantic what are thought to be goddess statues or human statues at least because there's still an argument as to whether they're male female or even possibly androgynous now the reason they're believed to be female is mainly because of the skirt and the kind of classic goddess look we find in many different cultures but actually there's a big debate about this now so we'll have a close look and see what we think what it is more likely to represent to me is fertility and abundance and fecundity of the land and the landscape and the temples and these were gigantic these were like probably eight nine feet tall possibly even taller some of them there's lots of smaller ones from like the Hypogeum Agarhym and many other places but this is one of the most impressive pieces left this is from Tartian and here we have a broken goddess figure you can see the base of it here this is from Tasylg and you can see the beautiful spirals along the base here as well and you can see it's like a relief on a piece of stone rather than a freestanding statue itself and we have the beautiful spiral figures on the base as well but then we have these gigantic ones replicas are now in Tartian itself why it's thought to be a female is partly because of the skirt but also look at the bulbous legs and then look at the carvings under here as well these are quite unusual no one's really been able to decipher these if they have a specific meaning or whether there is just a pattern going along the base there these are unique i've not seen these anywhere else before we've got a rare one here that actually has the head kind of attached to it this is a beautiful piece and again it's really hard to tell if it's a male or female there's no obvious breasts it's just it just looks like someone who's very well fed we have other ones here we have the Venus of Malta over here which is definitely a female but all over we find so many examples of these full-bodied figures it really was part of the cult part of the worship and i even think the cart ruts are representations of her being moved across the landscape in like pageants and ceremonies here we see some of like the headless figures the human figures the full-bodied figures now it's said that it's quite possible that they have removable heads because you can see a kind of hole in the top in some of them where they go in and out and in the museum at gigantia you can see some of the slots with the heads on top that go in these are some of the famous full-figured statues from hagar him you can see the way they're seated they're in a specific position this is very similar to one i've seen from gertrude tepe an 8200 bc site from ancient anatolia from the taz tepela region actually it was excavated by klaus schmidt before gobekli tepe started getting excavated in the mid-1990s but you can see particular ones here v-necks they've got holes where the head seems to have been slotted in like they were representing different things at different times and when the heads were placed it could mean something some people have suggested it could be like you know death could mean death and um you know the beheading or you know a ritual sacrifice there's different different reasons and different ideas if we look here as well we have some larger ones again from the same area these ones here also from hagar him this is much more weather so this was clearly outside but it's a fantastic video you watch when you visit hagar him and you actually see a recreation of what the interior of the temples were like with these statues in situ and it just makes you realize that this was an extremely important godlike figure or goddess figure or androgynous figure it was certainly something strong that represented what they're all about their religion their beliefs maybe fertility or something else so here are some of the heads that may have been slotted into these full figures these statues these possible goddess figures see a whole array of them here there's a whole bunch down here as well there's something even made of crystal there's one here that looks like the head in the karahan tepe pillar shrine or structure ab if you look closely it's got the same kind of features even got an open mouth and we have other ones going along here even down here we have most crystalline looking ones these are amazing all different sizes different expressions hard to tell if they're female or male most of them go with the kind of short bob hairstyle but there is a couple where they have a bald for instance or they have really elaborate ponytails and you can actually see that there on the kind of third one down just at the back there even one here which is very confusing it almost looks like kind of tail and i hate to say it but it's like some kind of tail or maybe it's a plaque coming off the back of the head it's hair that's been partly broken but it literally looks like a tail sort of attached to the back of the goddess figure itself and just above that there we see the example beautifully detailed with the v-neck again a symbol we find in ancient Anatolia now also some of these have six fingers more than five fingers so this is like an anatomic anomaly which has been recorded as even a handprint that was discovered in the hypogeum that also has six fingers which could be extremely ancient and again you can see the exquisite detail of the stone carving of this figure here so i find these fascinating look at these these are like phallic imagery phallic carvings um amulets from the whole temple period and this is from it's almost like a temple model almost like the phalluses are holding up the temple or part of the temple itself we've got two on their side going in different directions here again this is from Tartian this one here again most of these are from Tartian this is unknown that one's from Tartian as well so it does show a similarity in style from the ones from Tartian but these are more kind of rough hewn kind of amulets so this one here is not two it's actually one piece that's been broken and it was actually the one on the left is placed on top of the one on the right and you can see so that's intriguing so it's almost like they're building these phallic imagery into the temples themselves these actually just show you some of the other statues this is from Zara stone circle then we have a seated one here as well almost like stargazing and also a double one which will triple possibly which would have had multiple heads so i find these particularly fascinating they're not just sleeping ladies they're not just goddesses they're something else going on here then we have huge amounts of pottery this is actually all from the temple period as well all these pieces all this jewelry it's just some examples of what they were making back then and recreations of what they would have looked like some of the beautiful pendants much like what we find in other parts of europe so now heading upstairs there's a whole other section up here if you visit in the museum it's definitely worth checking out this is a really cool ancient building as well you can actually see behind me the whole entrance area and how awesome it is what we're going to see now is the hypogeum skulls so here we are at Valetta archaeological museum and this is the elongated skull room now these aren't hugely elongated some people have said some of them are missing the much more elongated ones i'll give you some old photos in the video here but this is a massive controversy and a lot of effort has now been put into it to disprove there's anything unusual here there's all the skulls here are pretty standard there's a couple of ones with slight elongation but these were all found in back in 1912 by Temi Zamet who was one of the early archaeologists here was also the one who was putting forward extremely ancient dates for the temples here which now match with the work of Leni Rijic but now these aren't exactly Peruvian skulls with really high elongation these are more like lobes going backwards but again there doesn't seem to be any evidence of cranial deformation or head binding this seems to be natural now we do find this with the work of Maria Wheatley as some of the skulls she's found in Wiltshire where the early Neolithic people were much slighter and they had longer skulls at the back whereas the Beaker people the Europeans who came in around 2500 BC onwards had rounder heavier skulls but yeah let's have a look around let me know what you think because this is a fascinating aspect of the temple culture of ancient Malta were they long heads this is particularly interesting this one here most of these were of a kind of youngish age up to about 50 late teenage not many over that age but there are some children's ones here as well i must remember there were over 7 000 human remains found in the hypogeum itself and several of these a handful of these were clearly elongated naturally this is the natural genetic thing there's no head binding evidence here although there is evidence of trepanning and what this suggests is a certain type of people going back to the early Neolithic era era and so yeah people have said the alien skulls they're like the ones in Nazca but they're really not they're quite different and they can be explained as such but many of them have gone missing there are actual photos of ones there's a whole conspiracy about what happened to them kind of shows you all the excavators notes from Temizamit back in 1912 onwards obviously we have the hypogeum itself here this is actually on top of the hypogeum we actually have a temple on top and then below we have the main three level going 30 meters down into the earth into the rock beneath it these stunning beautiful chambers and this is where all these were found skulls were found here sleeping beauty and much much more then we have the whole story of trepanation which is again something we find actually in Peru and other places actually all over the world and there seems to be evidence of it here in one of the skulls i can't see it on display here this might be on display in the hypogeum itself but look you can see it's healed around the kind of incision suggesting that this was a medical or spiritual procedure either to remove blood clots or blood from the brain to relieve pressure or it could have been something else it could have been a spiritual thing could be part of the ritualistic nature of the people here either way it proves that they had an understanding of cranial anatomy these were very smart very sophisticated people so we're just finishing up now in the elongated skulls room we're now going to continue and look at the small cart rut section they've actually got here and then we'll complete the main areas of the Valletta museum there are other sections later sections going into iron age bronze age and everything else but i wanted to focus on the temple period here and the very ancient very mysterious aspects of what's going on here in ancient malta so we'll take a quick look at some of the bronze age area the reason being is because they actually feature dolmens in here this is what i'm fascinated by there are a few dolmens here in malta we've got some examples here we always visit we go to sansuna dolmen as well but there are more on the island but we're gonna have a quick walk around here what's through here though is particularly interesting to me this is the cart ruts room so this is one of the biggest mysteries of malta the cart ruts we have here dr david trump professor trump he's was really into the cart ruts he's a british archaeologist did most of the work here on the sites the temple sites temple culture sites of malta you see on the floor here they're actually carved out and made fiberglass cart ruts but we find dozens of areas all over the country that have these clapham junction being the most famous in st george's bay they even go into the sea just an extremely early date even graham hancock is actually like scuba dived off the coast of st george's bay and found them deep in the water suggesting an extreme age now i'm not going to go into all the theories here but these are carved out of solid limestone linked up always two of them together going off in different directions like train tracks often together and then they divide over vast distances often going off cliff edges and everything else and so they're about 1.4 meters or about just over five feet wide and they're really quite astonishing when you start looking around and trying to understand what they're all about interestingly we even find them in different countries like turkey the azores even sicily when you say it was joined to sicily remember malta was india america france portugal other places it's amazing worldwide phenomena all seem to be the same width apart and the same style as though carts or cars have just driven through them when it was almost like mud and it's being fossilized so yeah the work of david trump is really exceptional he's found dozens of sites i think up to 60 or 70 sites in total some of them are now built over you can't see many of them but you can go to clapham junction san juan uh st george's bay we see them at chachank on gozo and various other places any opinions about them might be interesting but i'm just delighted there's a small room here dedicated to cart ruts because often they're overlooked and joked about actually to me they're very important very intriguing mystery of the ancients so they showed this on repeat this brilliant video with david trump investigating the cart ruts but he was the one who really put them on the map and made people realize their significance and mystery because often they just thought they were used to drag the stones across on carts using oxen or other things but as you can see here you can see actually below me at the actual museum itself there's much more to this you can see some of them even carved out here they've kind of put fiberglass models just so you can get a sense of them some of them look like they're carved they're extremely deep some of them are quite shallow but they're all the same they all function in the same way there's actually even a map just over here as you see them under the glass here and here's just a little map shows you where they're all found so there's actually quite a lot of them so it just shows you how many there are on the Maltese islands so we've had a good look around the museum i hope you enjoyed our visit to all the different areas especially the temple period which fascinates me and the cart ruts thanks for watching megalithomaniacs hoped you enjoyed this exploration of Valletta archaeology museum the national museum here in malta you can join us every march over the 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