Archive 2814

MEDITERRANEAN BASIN CATASTROPHE/ MALTA’S PREHISTORIC GENIUS … Page 16

by Dr. Joseph S. Ellul

While these articles provide some fascinating evidence to support the Genesis Flood, we don’t agree with Dr. Ellul’s conclusion that the flood covered most of the known world rather than the entire world–as we believe Genesis teaches it did.

Malta’s Prehistoric Genius

Hagar Qim. Click and drag photo to resize.

This article, which could be considered as a very short synopsis of the highlights of my book, was first published in Illinois, U.S.A., in the January-February 1983 edition of Ancient Skies, which is the Official Logbook of the Ancient Astronaut Society, an international organisation whose members are very much interested in arch?ology.

By the term “pre-historic” I am referring to the period before the Biblical Flood which covered the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. This flood has left its stigma in the surrounding areas as a layer of virgin silt with evidence of other civilizations below the silt.

This was found by Professor & Lady Woolley in Mesopotamia and also by Sir Temi Zammit on Malta and in the South of France. These layers of silt were eight feet deep in Mesopotamia, three feet on Malta and six feet in France.

Besides the silt, there is also evidence of an enormous wave of water coming directly from the West and throwing huge blocks of stone towards the East. A careful examination of the stone ruins of the Temple at Hagar Qim on Malta reveals how huge stone building-blocks have been lifted up and thrown against the tops of other stones in the building.

Hagar Qim is situated on a high promontory near the edge of the Mediterranean Sea on the south-western edge of the main island of Malta.

Therefore, I conclude that the Temple of Hagar Qim was constructed before the Biblical Flood and that the flood was caused by the abrupt opening of the high-towering land-ridge that formerly linked Gibraltar with Tangier, permitting the waters of the Atlantic Ocean to rush into the Mediterranean depression, some 6,000 feet below.

What did the people of Malta, thousands of years ago, know about construction engineering?

They knew that the strongest type of construction was the oval one, as shown by all the rooms in the various temples. They knew how to construct the horizontal arch, which we today use for building water-dams.

They began building a dome by the corbelling method, but then changed to the arched dome we use today. They used mortar to plaster unwanted crevices in their stone buildings. The mortar has since petrified into stone joining huge blocks together.

They were wizards in acoustic construction. At Hagar Qim they used slabs 4″ thick to reflect sound to make it pass through a hole in the wall about one foot in diameter.

At the Hypogeum (underground) they constructed a recessed amplifier built into the stone wall of a room which will make the human voice reverberate throughout the entire vast temple of three stories dug out of the solid rock beneath ground-level.

All the main temples of Malta were built in astronomical alignment either to the Sun’s Equinox or to one of the Solstices, or to the Major Standstill of the Moon.

Hagar Qim. Click and drag photo to resize.

They constructed a network of “cart-ruts” cut into the hard rocky surface of the land, which they used for regular travel. In my opinion, these so called “ruts” were not made by the repeated action of vehicles running in the same place, but were systematically cut into the rock to form a track-system in which wheeled vehicles ran.

Many years ago my father and I excavated two sets of cart-ruts to show to tourists and other interested persons. One of the sets is in a field only about 300 years to the East of Hagar Qim, although it has since been claimed that such tracks are nowhere to be found in the vicinity of any known temple.

Another set of ruts, made up of a junction of two pairs of ruts, is about one hundred yards further away in an unused part of the road leading to Hagar Qim. Although my father used continually to clean out these ruts, they invariably soon filled up again with dirt.

These cart-ruts near Hagar Qim are under soil and perfectly preserved. From observations of the ruts, I have deduced that they date back to the Stone-Age period and belong to the times of Hagar Qim and contemporaneous buildings on Malta. This means that people in those days regularly travelled over these established routes and were not just roaming about.

This system of ruts was a kind of primitive tram-lines, and must have been dug by tools to make a well defined way for the wheels of the vehicles to turn in. I refer to wheels, because the characteristics of the ruts all point to the use of wheels.

The axles would have had a clearance of at least 15 inches with wheels about 3 feet in diameter, in the form of a bi-convex lens with a rim about 2? inches wide.

Although otherwise similar in appearance to a grinding-stone, these wheels would also have had a very well polished central bore. I have since found a remnant of a cart-wheel made of lava stone lying in an arch?ological site.

Wheels and wheel ruts. Click and drag photo to resize.

1In further examining the ruts near Hagar Qim, I noticed that the bottom of the ruts have a peculiar shape. It is not worn out uniformly, but at the base of the rut there is about a 2?”-wide groove about ?” deep, running along the rut.

This groove is on the side of the inclination of the track. The width of the groove indicates the width of the rim of the wheel which ran in the track.

It has been suggested that the people on Malta used heavy sledges for transportation, and that the sledges made the ruts through continual use. This must be ruled out, because the sledges could not turn in a bent rut – and many of the ruts do bend. Most of them are, in fact, curved to some degree; very few are perfectly straight.

Also, sledges could not have made the strange indentations at the bottom of the ruts to which reference has already been made.

These are my conclusions based on an examination of perfectly preserved ruts:

The ruts were constructed with tools to a desired shape and depth for a particular type of wheeled vehicle to travel in. 2. They have been cut to different depths to level off sloping ground, so that the vehicle would not tilt to either side. 3. They were cut wider where there was a bend in the road. 4. Where the bottom of the rut was normally about 4?” wide, about 2?” were worn deeper through vehicular use. 5. In some places there are about 15″ from the bottom of the ruts to the top.

There are cart-ruts literally all over the main island of Malta, some go right into the sea. Also, I have discovered ruts going to the very edge of a cliff with a sheer drop of 100 feet to the sea. These observations indicate that the ruts were made before Malta became an island.

“Webmaster’s note: In his Malta – An Arch?ological Guide (revised edition, 2000, pp. 35, 48 & 60), David H. Trump states that Malta became an island some “5,000,000” years ago. He also reiterates his long-standing conviction that Malta’s cart-ruts date from “the later Bronze Age, a period covering many centuries.” However, he readily concedes that “arch?ologists frequently have to reassess their interpretations drastically.”

Mr. Ellul is an amateur arch?ologist and a life-long resident of Malta. His address is Hagar Qim House, 49 St. Catherine Street, Zurrieq ZRQ 06, Malta. Members of the Ancient Astronaut Society who took part in the Society’s expedition to Malta in November 1982 are grateful to Mr. Ellul for conducting them through the ruins of the Temple at Hagar Qim and to the nearby cart-ruts.

The preceding paragraph represents a spontaneous and unsolicited comment by the editorship of Ancient Skies.”

…Conclusion of MEDITERRANEAN BASIN CATASTROPHE

The Mediterranean consisted of only two or perhaps three fresh-water lakes, one in the East in the Ionian and Herodotus Abyssal Plains, and another one or two in the western basin of the Sardinian and Balearic Abyssal Plain.

What today are the Straits of Gibraltar were in those days a high-towering land-ridge, from which, according to Genesis (7:11) there flowed down streams of water that percolated through its crevices, with the Atlantic (in Genesis called “The Great Deep”) about 2000 metres above the Mediterranean depression.

A large earthquake then caused a rift valley that made this Gibraltar high land-ridge subside, continuing the rift along the Algerian Basin, the Algerian Tyrrhenian Trough, and into the Malta Trough. This Malta trough is evidenced by the sheer cliffs of Malta’s southern coast, with an abrupt drop of about 30 metres with another 10 fathoms’ depth of sea.

With the subsidence of the Gibraltar high ridge the Atlantic ocean, with the waters of all the other oceans behind it, rushed through the gap, flooding and sweeping everything before it.

One must try to imagine it – there are no words available adequately to describe the enormous on-rush of water that then swept over Europe, the western half of Asia, and the whole of North Africa – almost all the then-known world.

When this water covered the land, before it receded, it left its mark: a covering of silt or water-deposited sand over all the land.

In Mesopotamia, to where most of the sand was carried, it left a depth of 3 metres, found by Sir Leonard Wooley. In Malta, which lies in the middle of the wave’s path, 1 metre of sand was discovered by Sir Temi Zammit and my father when excavating the Tarxien Temples, while in southern France 2 metres were discovered.

,

At Xari Suste, Mesopotamia, a whole town was found buried under sand, with tables ready for meals and skeletons in sleeping positions. The arch?ologists commented that a civilization had vanished abruptly for no apparent reason. It had to be the Gibraltar wave that came so suddenly.

This cataclysm surely had its effects all around the world, where inhabitants lived mostly along the seashore. An enormous seismic wave surely affected the entire Atlantic seaboard, especially the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea – just opposite Gibraltar.

Even the Pacific and Indian Ocean felt its effects. It is no wonder the story of the flood is narrated, though in different forms, all around the world.

The dating of this catastrophe, caused by the collapse of the Gibraltar high ridge, is very important. There were several hypotheses until Carbon-14 was used, and we must hope that we are now near a proper date. When Fernand Navarra claimed to have brought bits of wood from Noah’s Ark from Mount Ararat, the wood was Carbon-14 tested and dated as 5000 years old.

When materials from Malta’s Neolithic temples were Carbon-14 tested by Cambridge expert Colin Renfrew, they were also, according to Dr. Tancred Gouder, curator of Malta’s arch?ological remains, found to be 5000 years old.

Many human and animal bones found inside the Neolithic temples, including a human skull at ?a?ar Qim and others in the Hypogeum at ?al Saflieni in Paola belong to the same era. Carbon-14 tests have shown reasonable dates for what we can now consider as some of our human world’s earliest mysteries.

Joseph S. Ellul