Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Most of the graves were originally under enormous mounds and could contain hundreds of dead. They were used for collective burial, on successive occasions, and the grave goods were in general unimpressive. Very rarely the chambers have a central pillar and traces of painting can be seen. As Mircea Eliade has said, all this ‘testifies to a very important cult of the dead’: the houses where the peasants of this culture lived have not stood the test of time, whereas the chamber tombs are the longest-surviving structures in the history of the world. Perhaps the most impressive structures of all are the stone temples of Malta, which some archaeologists consider may have been a sacred island in pre-history. The most striking, according to Colin Renfrew, is at Ggantija on Gozo, the more northerly of the Maltese archipelago. ‘In front of the Ggantija is a spacious terrace, some forty metres wide; supported by a great retaining wall, the façade, perhaps the earliest architecturally conceived exterior in the world, is memorably imposing. Large slabs of coralline limestone, set alternately end-on and sideways-on, rise to a height of eight metres; these slabs are up to four metres high for the first course, and above this six courses of megalithic blocks still survive. A small temple model of the period suggests that originally the façade may have been as high as sixteen metres.’⁴³ In one of the other Maltese temples, Tarxien, on Malta itself, relief carvings of spirals were found, together with friezes of animals and, most surprising of all, ‘a large fragment of a colossal statue of a seated woman. Originally she must have attained a height of two metres in the seated position. This must be the earliest colossal statue in the world.’⁴⁴ Several smaller stone structures have also been found, most of them ‘fat ladies’, ‘splendidly plump personages in stone’.⁴⁵ The basic idea, of a seated goddess, possibly pregnant, certainly recalls the Natufian figures discussed by Cauvin.