Ġgantija Temples: Megalithic Temples of Gozo in Prehistoric Malta

The Ġgantija temples are two megalithic temples on the Maltese island of Gozo, built between about 3600 and 3200 BC by Neolithic farming communities. Their massive stone walls, some of which still stand around 6 metres high, make them among the oldest free-standing stone monuments in the world, older than Stonehenge’s stone circle and the Egyptian pyramids. The site gave its name to a whole phase of Maltese prehistory and is the centrepiece of the UNESCO-listed Megalithic Temples of Malta.

Background: the first islanders of Malta

The Maltese islands, Malta, Gozo and Comino, lie about 90 kilometres (56 miles) south of Sicily. People first settled them around 5900 BC, crossing from Sicily with seed grain and domestic animals. These early farmers grew wheat, barley and lentils and kept sheep, goats, cattle and pigs.

For roughly two thousand years, these communities lived in villages of huts and buried their dead in caves and rock-cut tombs. Their pottery styles changed over time, and archaeologists use those changes to divide Maltese prehistory into phases named after key sites.

From about 3600 BC something remarkable happened. The islanders began to build large monuments of stone that had no close parallels anywhere else in the Mediterranean. The earliest of these great temples stand at Ġgantija, and the period from about 3600 to 3200 BC is called the Ġgantija phase after them. Temple building continued through the following Saflieni and Tarxien phases until around 2500 BC.

Layout of the two temples

Ġgantija stands on the edge of the Xagħra plateau, looking south-east across the fertile valleys of central Gozo towards the sea. It consists of two temples set side by side and enclosed by a single outer boundary wall. Both open onto a shared concave facade, in front of which was a broad terrace or forecourt where large gatherings could have taken place.

The southern temple is the older and larger of the two, built around 3600 BC. Inside, a central passage leads through a series of paired, rounded chambers called apses, ending in a further apse at the back. With five apses in all, it has a plan sometimes compared to a clover leaf. The northern temple was added several centuries later. It is smaller and has four apses and a shallow niche at the end.

Doorways are formed by large upright slabs topped by horizontal lintels. Inside the chambers stood stone altars, niches and low screens, as well as hearths. Holes in the floor, often called libation holes, may have received liquid offerings. Traces of plaster survive on some interior walls, and red ochre has been found, suggesting the interiors were once plastered and painted.

How they were built

The builders used two kinds of local limestone. Hard, coarse coralline limestone formed the massive outer walls, while softer globigerina limestone, easier to shape, was used for doorways, floors, altars and decorative elements.

The scale of the outer wall is striking. Some of its blocks are more than 5 metres long and are estimated to weigh as much as 50 tonnes. The wall was built with large stones set alternately upright and flat, a technique that added strength. The space between the outer wall and the inner chamber walls was filled with earth and rubble, holding the structure together.

No metal tools were available. The builders worked with stone and flint tools, levers, ropes, and probably timber rollers or sledges. Small stone spheres found at several Maltese temple sites have been suggested as rollers for moving heavy blocks, although this remains an interpretation. Whether the chambers were roofed is debated; many archaeologists think they were at least partly covered with timber beams, hides or corbelled stone.

Building on this scale required organised labour from many families, and probably the shared surplus of a successful farming economy. It suggests a society with strong communal ties and some form of leadership able to plan and coordinate work over many years.

Purpose and beliefs

Ġgantija is called a temple because almost everything found inside it points to ritual rather than everyday life. There are no signs that people lived within the walls. Instead, excavators found altars, hearths, animal bones that may come from sacrifices or feasts, and carved stone objects.

Across the Maltese temples, small statues of very large, often seated human figures have been found. They are frequently described as fertility goddesses or “fat ladies”, but many of them are not clearly female, and their meaning is uncertain. Two carved stone heads have been recovered from Ġgantija itself. Phallic stone symbols and decorated blocks with spiral patterns also appear at Maltese temple sites.

Nearby, about 300 metres away on the same plateau, lies the Xagħra Stone Circle, sometimes called the Brochtorff Circle. Excavated between 1987 and 1994 by a team that included Caroline Malone, Simon Stoddart, David Trump and Anthony Bonanno, it was an underground burial complex used by the same communities. It contained the remains of many hundreds of people and remarkable carved figures, showing that the temple builders treated their dead with as much care as their gods. A similar underground complex survives on Malta at the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum.

Legends of the giants

The name Ġgantija comes from the Maltese word ġgant, meaning giant. For centuries, local people believed that only giants could have raised such huge stones. One widely told folk tale says the temple was built by a giantess named Sansuna, who carried the great blocks on her head while nursing her child, completing the work in a single day and night.

These stories reflect the awe the ruins inspired long before archaeology could explain them. They are folklore, not history, but they have given the site its lasting name and remain part of Gozo’s cultural heritage.

Rediscovery and excavation

The ruins were never entirely hidden. Travellers in the 18th century described them, and the French artist Jean-Pierre Houël published an illustration of Ġgantija in the 1780s. At that time the interior was still largely buried under soil and debris.

In 1827 Colonel John Otto Bayer, then lieutenant-governor of Gozo, had the interior cleared. The work was done quickly and without careful recording, and many finds and much information were lost. Fortunately, the painter Charles de Brocktorff made a series of watercolours of the site soon after the clearance, which are now valuable records of its condition at that time.

Later archaeologists, including Themistocles Zammit in the early 20th century and John Davies Evans in the 1950s, studied the Maltese temples and their culture. Evans’s survey, published in 1971, and radiocarbon dating from the 1960s onwards established that the Maltese temples were far older than had once been thought, and older than the Mycenaean and Egyptian monuments to which they had been compared.

In 1980 UNESCO inscribed Ġgantija on the World Heritage List. In 1992 the listing was extended to include five other temple sites, among them Ħaġar Qim, Mnajdra and Tarxien, under the name Megalithic Temples of Malta. An interpretation centre and archaeological park run by Heritage Malta opened at Ġgantija in 2013.

The end of the temple period

Around 2500 BC, the temple culture of Malta came to an end. The temples went out of use and the old burial traditions ceased. They were followed by Bronze Age newcomers who cremated their dead, a period named after the Tarxien Cemetery, which was built over the ruins of the Tarxien temples.

The causes of this collapse are still debated. Suggestions include soil exhaustion and environmental stress, drought, disease, social strain within a society that invested heavily in monuments, and the arrival of new groups. Recent research projects have studied pollen, soils and ancient remains to test these ideas, but no single explanation has been agreed.

One of the largest of these, the FRAGSUS project led by Caroline Malone between 2013 and 2018, examined how fragile the islands’ environment was for early farmers. Its work suggests that the temple communities lived for many centuries with thin soils, erosion and periods of drought, and that the end of the temple culture may have come from several pressures acting together rather than from one sudden disaster.

Today Ġgantija is managed by Heritage Malta. The visitor centre beside the site displays finds from Ġgantija and the nearby Xagħra Stone Circle, including carved figures, and paths lead visitors around the outer wall and into the two temples, where the scale of the stones can be appreciated at close quarters.

Timeline

• c. 5900 BC: Farmers from Sicily settle the Maltese islands.
• c. 3600 BC: The southern temple at Ġgantija is built, marking the start of the Ġgantija phase.
• c. 3600–3200 BC: The northern temple is added several centuries later; temple building spreads across Malta and Gozo.
• c. 3150–2500 BC: The Tarxien phase, the peak of Maltese temple culture.
• c. 2500 BC: The temple period ends.
• 1780s: Jean-Pierre Houël publishes an illustration of the ruins.
• 1827: Colonel John Otto Bayer has the interior cleared.
• 1980: Ġgantija is inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
• 1992: The listing is extended to other Maltese temples.
• 2013: The Ġgantija interpretation centre opens.

Why it matters

Ġgantija shows that a small island farming society could create monumental architecture more than 5,000 years ago, long before the better-known monuments of Egypt and Britain. It is a key witness to the inventiveness of Neolithic Europe and to the distinctive temple culture that flourished only on Malta and Gozo.