The Tarxien Temples Mystery – Older Than the Pyramids & Still Full of Secrets - Malta 🇲🇹

Not everything is as you would believe. It's like just like Stonehenge. You wonder did the people that built this then migrate? Welcome to another one of my videos. Today I'm in Malta. I'm on the main island and here I am today to visit the Tarsium temples. I'm excited. I've been wanting to see this for years. So, let's go and have a look what this has to offer. Standing here in Tarsium, just a short walk from the ordinary streets of Paola, you feel the collision of times more sharply than almost anywhere else on these magnificent islands. Washing lines, satellite dishes, the hum of modern Malta and right in the middle of it all the most elaborately decorated temple complex left by people. We still call temple builders. These are the Tarsium temples. Four interconnected structures raised between 3600 BC and 2500 BC. Now, the first thing you notice when you get to the Tarsium temples is they've actually gone to the trouble of trying their best to preserve this. It's undercover. Many of the Neolithic sites that I've visited around the world simply aren't covered like this. When I see this I think of Goblepoli Tepe. Although don't get me started on Goblepoli Tepe. That place is not being looked after as best it could. What kind of imbeciles decide that it's a good idea to plant trees on a Neolithic site that it has only been 10% excavated. At least here the Maltese are going to the trouble of preserving this as best they can and allowing it to be investigated by future archaeologists and future scientists and future historians and also to be admired by members of the public just like myself. This is quite awe-inspiring because this is seriously old. The mainstream suggests these are older than the Great Pyramid, older than Stonehenge and like Gigante Rongoso that we explored together. Part of that extraordinary UNESCO megalithic temples that still refuses to give up all its secrets. I first came to Malta chasing the cart ruts. Those strange parallel grooves that run across the limestone and in places vanish into the sea. The more time you spend with those ruts the more you feel the same unanswered questions rising here at Tarsium. Who were these people? How did they move stones that weigh many tons without the wheel or metal tools? And why after more than a thousand years of building did it all stop so suddenly? Now anyone that's seen my video on Gozo will remember the Giganteum temples. Similar in design as you can see the entrance. I don't know if we can see this here. The entrance into this sort of clover shaped. So entrance clover shape clover shape. But unlike Giganteum this one is actually bigger. We've got one, two, three potential entrances. Maybe four. But it's remarkable. It really is remarkable. The story of how we even know this place exists begins with a farmer. In 1913 Lorenzo Despot kept hitting large blocks while plowing his field. He contacted Thermostocles Zamet. The remarkable Maltese doctor turned archaeologist who'd already began work on the Between 1915 and 1990 Zamet and a small army of local helpers uncovered what you see around us now. Four temples layer upon layer of ritual and a final chapter written in fire and ash by people who came centuries later. The earliest structure here belongs to the Giganteum phase. The same cultural horizon as the great temples on Gozo. Then in the Tarsium phase that gives the site its name. The builders reached the height of their architectural and artistic ambition. The south temple, the east temple and finally the unique central temple with its six apses. The only one of its kind on the islands. Now a word from our sponsor. If I'm traveling to the US, if I'm traveling to Japan, if I'm traveling to Taiwan, Australia, France which is where I am right now. I don't want to rely on my mobile phone company who's going to charge me an absolute fortune. 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Fast speeds and reliable. So many e-sims promise the world and they deliver nothing. ROAMLESS thankfully works every time I step out of a French station or a Taiwanese cafe. ROAMLESS has my back. Use my code WONDERING. Back to the video. Right behind me this is supposed to be possibly one of the oldest of the megalithic structures. Completely destroyed though almost because this effectively was a field that was being plowed by farmers. Local farmers. Some of it still survives. You can still see the concave structure just here. You know it's remarkable it has survived you know not obviously to the same degree that over here. 5,800 years ago they reckon the age of this is. That's a guesstimate. Look right behind me. Beautiful cemetery. It could have easily been turned into a cemetery. You know concreted over to respect the locals who died and completely forgotten but this has been preserved for hopefully now generations and generations of humans to come. That hopefully will be humans a thousand years, two thousand years time looking over this as they hover with their jet packs. Going what a remarkable place we came from as humans. Walking through them you move from open courts into increasingly private womb-like chambers. Doorways that once held wooden screens. Altars still bearing the scars of fire. Right in the middle of the Taxian temples you see this weather station effectively allowing the scientists to know if this is being kept at adequate temperatures just so preservation can continue and there's no huge fluctuations. It can get very hot in Malta and it can also get very cold so that hot cold can cause problems when it comes to rocks. It's remarkable that you know these five thousand, five and a half thousand, almost six thousand year old rocks that have been put here by humans have survived in the structure of the way it has. I mean look at this. Just look at how they set about this concave design. It's remarkable and those that remember my Gozo video you'll remember holes in the entrances and this being an entrance this would have been used by potentially pieces of wood but probably more likely to be rope. Rope would have been pulled through this sort of mechanism because you can see a rope can go through there and this this bit here look at this this is where the block would have been. The wooden post sort of sealed this as a door and obviously the wood has rotted since then but truly truly remarkable that we're seeing the same sort of design throughout the island with all the different megalithic structures. Here we have some more rope mechanisms down here. It's like just like Stonehenge. You wonder did the people that build this then migrate to British Isles to then build the Stonehenge? I can imagine they they could be related. Look closely at the carved surfaces and you see the mind of these people more clearly than almost anywhere else. Running spirals some almost looking ominous others pure geometry across screens and altars. Processions of animals in low relief. Rams, sheep, a sow with litter, bulls. One famous slab shows a line of animals that seem to lead straight towards sacrifice. Now just like in Pobletepe where they found animal pictures all over the rocks animal pictures are also found here. What we saw in the museum in Valletta the archaeological museum watch my video on Valletta if you want to see that you'll see the antelope or the deer carved into the rocks. I think this is possibly one of the rocks that's now in a museum. I don't know how they've done that. Graffiti but this is obviously modern day graffiti. This has no relation to the people that would have built the Tartan temples probably done in the neolithic bronze age. So you know it's like a it's almost like the same way that some youngster rocks up to the Colosseum today and leaves a bit of graffiti there. They may have left graffiti that doesn't mean they were responsible for building the Colosseum. And the near entrance to the south temple stands the lower half of a colossal statue. The largest known human figure from the Maltese Neolithic. Now this is remarkable to see. This is the original goddess of fertility or what is considered fertility. This was a bustly female type character. Some potentially suggest that she was Samsun the giant. Some suggest she's a fertility god. Some suggest she's just a local that takes care of themselves and is able to give birth to many many children. This would have been a woman. We're missing the top half. But these statues have been found all over Malta. This being one of the bigger ones. And that is remarkable to see that being preserved here on site as opposed to at the archaeological museum in the center of the latter. Broad calves. A heavy pleated skirt. Small feet. The upper body is long gone. When complete it would have stood two and a half meters or more. Early excavators called her the mother goddess. The fat lady. The great fertility figure. Modern scholarship is more careful. Some claim the statue is genderless. The heads of smaller figurines found across the islands were often interchangeable. Yet the emphasis on the lower body. The association with grain and livestock. The very layout of the temples that from above can resemble exaggerated feminine forms. All of it still points towards a deep preoccupation with fertility, regeneration and the cycles that kept the island population alive. Animal bones concentrate above the altars. A flint knife carefully placed in a sealed compartment inside one of those altars. Together with pottery shards and partially charred remains. Stone spheres and rollers left behind outside the south temple that show us how they moved the megaliths. Everything here speaks of a ritual that was both practical and profoundly symbolic. Feasting. Sacrifice. Perhaps ancestor veneration. Perhaps a priesthood that grew more powerful as the centuries passed. And then around 2500 BC it ends. No new temples are built. The great structures fall silent. Within a few generations a completely different people arrive. Carrying bronze. Practicing cremation and turning the floors of these very temples into a cemetery. Zammit found a sterile layer separating the two cultures. Later researchers have debated how clean that break really was. But the change in material culture, ideology and burial practice is stark. So what happened? The mainstream explanations are sober and multi-layered. Environmental stress is high on the list. Pollen records and soil studies show progressive deforestation and soil erosion. In the final centuries of the temple period, child mortality appears to rise dramatically. Some skeletons show signs of dietary deficiency. A climatic downturn around the 4.2 ka event. A period of drought and instability felt across the Mediterranean and those lands to the east may have delivered the final blow. Others speak of social collapse. A society that had invested so much energy in monumental religion that it became brittle when resources tightened. Invasion or migration from Sicily or further afield has also been proposed. Ancient DNA hints at new arrivals in the centuries around the end. The importation of new culture probably and most likely brought an end to this culture. Notice the straights. This is almost something that looks almost modern. But it's straight lines right now. Is it modern? The main entrance is megalithic inside. Only the lower part survives. Ah, okay. It had me fooled. The main entrance is a reconstruction built in the 1950s. Not everything is as you would believe. It's inspired by a typical trilaphon doorway or other contemporary structures and based on fragments of a stone model of a facade discovered in the complex. Okay, so it's supposed to look like this. It's supposed to look like this they reckon. And they just reconstructed it. But stand here long enough and the quieter more unsettling questions return. The same ones that surface when you walk around the cart ruts at Clapham Junction or stand in Gigantia beneath the legend of the giantess Sansuna. The local folklore of Gozo says Sansuna, sustained on broad beans and honey, carried the great stones of Gigantia on her head while cradling her child. The name itself means place of the giants. Similar stories of giants once walked these islands. Are they pure myth or faint cultural memory of people who seem larger than life because of what they achieved? Now I know a lot of people don't like it when I mention his name, but I feel his name should be mentioned. Graham Hancock and others working in the ancient apocalypse tradition look at Malta and see something older still. They note that the cart ruts disappear into the sea, suggesting that they were cut when sea levels were much lower. Before the final post-glacial rise, they point to the sheer sophistication of the earliest temples and ask whether the temple builders were the first or the inheritors of knowledge from a culture that had already been shattered by the cataclysms at the end of the last ice age. Mainstream archaeology places the temples firmly after 3600 BC and rejects any ice age date. The radiocarbon is consistent yet the sense of discontinuity of a high culture that appears fully formed, builds with extraordinary skill and then vanishes remains one of the most haunting features of the Maltese prehistory. Even the spirals invite speculation. Some of them are pure decoration, others are symbols of eternity or the path of the soul. A recent study of temple orientations across the islands has found statistically significant alignments, especially in the earlier gigantean phase, towards certain southern stars that would have been useful for navigation in the central Mediterranean. Were these phases purely earthbound fertility sanctuaries or did they look upward? A few hundred meters from here lies the Hal Sathlini Hypogeum, the underground counterpart to these surface temples. The same people, the same period, the same symbols, the famous sleeping lady was found here. Together the two sites form one of the most complete ritual landscapes of European Neolithic. When you move between them you feel you're walking the same ceremonial circuit the temple builders once walked. I keep returning to these places because they refuse to be reduced to a single story. The evidence of animal sacrifice and yeasting is solid, the fertility symbolism is strong, the environmental pressures at the end are real, the sudden cultural break is also real and yet the unanswered questions, the precision of the stonework, the disappearance of knowledge, the myths of giants and the cart ruts that seem to belong to another logic entirely keep the wonder alive. Perhaps that's the real gift of the Tarkseum temples, it shows us people who for more than a thousand years poured their higher skills into stone, into ritual, into the attempt to hold the cycles of life and death in balance. Then the balance tipped, the temples fell quiet, new people came and burned their dead on the same floors where the old ceremonies have once taken place. We walk among the ruins now, phones in our pockets, washing lines overhead and still the stones speak. Not always in sentences we can truly translate but they speak. If you've been with me on earlier journeys through Malta, the cart ruts, the giantess of Gaijantia, the citadel of Gozo and the streets of Alata, you know this island holds more layers than most countries, many times its size. Tarkseum is one of the deepest of those layers. Stand here long enough and you start to wonder not only what these people believed but what we ourselves have forgotten about the deep past of the Mediterranean. The temples are quiet now but the questions they leave behind are still very much alive. Well I hope you enjoyed this insight into the Tarkseum temples, I have to say it's been a real real profound beautiful experience walking around here. I hope you learned something and if you enjoyed this video click the like, leave a comment and also maybe share it with one of your friends and if you feel a little bit more generous maybe click that subscribe button and hopefully I will see you in the next video. Quick thank you to my members, my Patreons, my Subscribestars, those that buy me coffees, those that give me super thanks and those that all around consistently turn up on the channel. Thank you very much and until next time hopefully you can enjoy one of these other videos. Keep progressing!