I have
in front of me a slim archaeological guidebook to Malta which proclaims
on its first page that the first humans on the island arrived around
seven thousand years ago from Sicily. The last page of the book mentions,
in one paragraph, the enigmatic "cart ruts" that are "too
obvious in the Maltese rocky landscape to be ignored." Well, a
brief paragraph at the end of the book is about as close to being ignored
as something can get that is declared to be so obvious in the landscape
of the area under discussion. The author of the little guidebook informs
us he believes they were intended for the transportation of construction
blocks from the quarry in ancient times. He then makes a point of saying
that he does not mean "prehistoric."
The temples
of Malta are its main attraction. Professor Anthony Bonanno [Museums
Department, Department of Classics and Archaeology at the University
of Malta.], the author of the
above mentioned booklet, declares in a news article [Old
Temples Society, Second issue, November 1999]
that the temples of Malta are "very reliably carbon-dated to
the period 3,600 to 2,500 BC. In that space of time we have traced
a regular evolution in style, from the small and rudimentary to the
large and complex."
The first
of these "Temples" was discovered in 1902 by a workman digging
a trench for the foundations of a house. His digging activities broke
through to a huge subterranean temple and cemetery, cut from solid rock.
Twelve years later, a farmer kept hitting stones in his field as he
ploughed, and this turned out to be a complex of temples. As time went
by, more and more structures were revealed, and they have become known
as the world's most impressive prehistoric monuments.
The first
thing that I notice about this is that all of these things were buried
for a very long time - so long that they were completely unknown to
the inhabitants of the region. But uniformitarian science tells us
that the surface of the earth is constantly being subjected to the processes
of erosion unless, of course, we are talking about a river delta or
a landslide or something. Apparently on Malta, things work backward.
They get covered up by some conditions unknown to uniformitarian science,
and then require millennia to be uncovered again.
As fascinating
as they are, I don't want to discuss the "temples." There
are numerous layers of them, and many of them are actually built on
top of the thing that has my attention, the "cart ruts" which
are so evident everywhere that they cannot be ignored, yet only deserve
a brief paragraph, and most certainly are not being protected by the
Maltese government, since they are of so little importance!
It's difficult
to find a good set of photographs of the ruts, but with persistence,
a photo here and another there, enough can be assembled to make some
observations. The facts are that, for cart ruts, they follow strange
rules. Very often, indeed, there are two parallel furrows; but they
differ not only from rut to rut, but a single parallel expanse can vary
in width and depth from one end to the other. That's a strange cart
that has an axle that expands and contracts. The ruts run through the
valleys, up the hills, down the dales, and sometimes more than one set
run side by side for awhile until they suddenly merge into a single
set of ruts. What is more amazing is that they often just keep going
- right into the Mediterranean - or right of the edge of a cliff.
Erich
von Daniken paid a visit to the island to examine them and thoughtfully
took his tape measure. It seems that the distance between a parallel
series of ruts can range from 65 to 123 cm. What is more amazing is
that some of them are up to 70 cm deep, going around sharp curves.
Anyone who has ever played with toy cars and trucks in the sandbox or
driven a sulky, has some idea of the problem here. A wheel large enough
to make a rut that deep could not possibly make such a curve. At one
point near San Pawl-Tat-Targa, four pairs of ruts, with four different
gauges, join up to make a single pair of ruts. Nearby, one set crosses
another, each with different rut depths. Another rut that extends up
to 60 cm deep, is only 11 cm wide at its deepest point and 20 cm wide
at its shallowest point. [Cf.
Von Daniken, Signs of the Gods]
The ruts
that run into the Mediterranean are most interesting. Divers have discovered
that the ruts continue a long way below the sea level. What is more
fascinating is that in July of 1999, amateur German archaeologist Dr.
Hubert Zeitlmair discovered a megalithic temple on the sea-bed in Malta's
territorial waters about 3 kilometers off the eastern coast. The problem
with this is, in order for a temple to lie on the bed of the Mediterranean,
it would have to date to the last ice age. The implication is that
the Maltese temples are at least six thousand years older than Dr. Bonnano
and his colleagues propose. Naturally, Dr. Bonnano was called upon
to pronounce sage words regarding this discovery.
If the
underwater temple does prove authentic, it would have to be a contemporary
of those built on the mainland. The only possibility that springs
to mind is that of a separate island, or even part of the mainland,
which sank because of a fault in the rock. It is highly unlikely,
but it does remain a possibility. There are after all no written
records of any kind dating back to that period. [Old
Temples Society, op.cit.]
Malta's
temples and tombs are unique in their construction: the massive piling
of stone upon stone, and the deep excavations. According to the experts,
they are a tremendous engineering feat, and they must have been the
sole focus of the society that built them. All the people of Malta
worked to build "temples" to the exclusion of all else, except
for subsistence. According to the experts, the people of Malta neither
built houses of stone nor learned how to write. They evolved all of
their techniques for one reason and one reason only: to build "temples"
to house their cult activities. How these people created a society
that was ready, willing and able to spend all their efforts and energy,
to labor incessantly in the work of tunneling and building, remains
a great mystery.
The distribution
of the "temples," plotted on a map, fall into clusters which
command a major area of territory. The island seems to be divided into
six major areas of this type. The problem arises when we consider the
fact that the island, at its best, could never support more than 11,000
people divided up into these six areas, at no more than 2000 people
per section. So, how could a group of about 2000 people at most, mobilize
the labor to excavate all those caverns and build all those "temples"
in each of the sections, particularly when you consider the fact that
the evidence shows that the area could not have supported so many people
in terms of food production. That leads to the problem of where they
were getting their food and how were they getting their food, if all
they were doing was building "temples" and performing cult
activities? Professor Colin Renfrew [Read
his book Before Civilization for the details. The ideas are too
puerile for me to waste any time on recounting them]
has proposed the "Big Chief Theory" whereby the building
of "temples" was instigated to awe the howling savages and
keep them in line.
Why do
I keep putting the world "temples" in quotes? Well, when
I looked at the photographs of these structure, the ground plans drawn
to scale, and the plaster models made of them, the only thing they reminded
me of was simply houses - places where people lived. After all, why
would there be so many "temples?" Of course! Because the
natives devoted their energies to building temples while they, themselves,
lived in grass or bearskin huts! That's it. Megalithic stone structures
MUST be temples because what other reason could there be for such Herculean
efforts to create them? That is, of course, assuming that the ability
to manage large blocks of stone were unusual. It certainly would be
for us today. So we cannot imagine that the ancient peoples might have
done it as easily as we nail gypsum board on cheap two-by-fours to build
our houses.
As noted,
archaeologists explain the cart ruts by saying that they are evidence
of the transporting of the blocks used to build the "temples."
But, we see from our descriptions of the cart ruts above, that the idea
that these grooves in the ground are really cart ruts runs into serious
problems. Any effort to explain them in this way falls apart if an
engineer instead of an archaeologist looks at them. In fact, in my
humble opinion, archaeologists ought to be required to have a degree
in engineering before they are allowed to say a single word about anything.
In the end, no one seems to have a single rational explanation for these
"cart ruts." One of the great mysteries on the planet, and
nobody seems to care. What a waste.
Do I have
an idea to propose? Of course I do. I wouldn't be writing about it
if I didn't. I would like to suggest that these "ruts" look
an awful lot like places where lightning has struck, and the electricity
has blasted away the dirt and rock as it shoots along some sort of natural
earth power grid conductor. The only difference is that the cart ruts
are not random. That suggests that there was something present in the
ground laid out in a definite grid, which acted as a conductor. Were
the cart ruts some sort of networked energy conduction system? Could
some sort of element have been placed in the ground by an ancient civilization;
something that that conducted power to their homes the way our vulgar
power poles and lines criss-cross the landscape? And then, at some
point in time, was the earth hit by such a surge of energy from some
unknown source that these power "lines" melted the rock in
which they were "strung?" Perhaps a surge of some kind of
cosmic energy source? Maybe even the Electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear
explosion? Maybe it was neither of these, but merely a massive overheating
of the surface of the earth so that the conduction element and its insulating
covering melted and was swept away?
Among
the artifacts discovered at Malta are a number of truly extraordinary
"goddess" images. They are, without exception, extremely
corpulent by today's standards. There are many representations of spirals
and other "goddess" motifs, including waves of water. According
to the experts, as we have already learned, the very oldest form of
religion that can be archaeologically identified anywere was the worship
of the Mother Goddess by wandering "hunter gatherers." It
was thought, for a very long time, that such cultures were very primitive
and narrow, but it has now been discovered that this is not the case.
New archaeological sites are being excavated at the present time that
show very advanced levels of art and culture among these "husbandmen"
of the Earth. An example is the Japanese Jomon culture.
The incipient
Jomon culture is said to date between 11,000 and 7,500 BC. It is described
as "one of the most affluent forager cultures to ever exist."
Although the Japanese did not settle Japan until the third century BC,
it seems that human beings have occupied the area from about 30,000
BC. During the Ice Ages, Japan was connected to the Korean peninsula
by means of a land bridge. Additionally, all four main Japanese islands
were connected, and the southern island of Kyushu was connected to the
Korean peninsula while the northern island of Hokkaido was connected
to Siberia.
