(1) Is this extremely serious charge true?
(2) If it is true, in what circumstances and for what reasons did the former Director of Museums [F. S. Mallia] order the removal of this prehistoric painting?
(3) How much of the painting was in fact removed and how much still remains visible today?
(4) If this charge, on the record since 1997, is NOT true could you please direct me to the place where I can find your department’s official rebuttal and refutation of it.
Additionally, I have received a more detailed account of the alleged ‘removal’ of the Hypogeum bull than that given in Dossier Malta. According to this account, F. S. Mallia apparently engaged in arguments about the significance of the bull with D. H. Trump: ‘At one point Mallia ordered one of the employees to scrub the representation off the wall, and he thus imagined that had settled the issue once and for all.’
Would you like to comment on behalf of the Museum about this account of the events?
I would also be grateful if you could supply me with Dr Mallia’s present contacts so that I may invite him to comment on this matter directly.
I look forward very much to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely,
Graham Hancock
Despite sending the e-mail twice to Dr Pace, and once to another member of staff at the Museum to pass on to him directly, I have not, at time of writing (15 November 2001) received any reply. I read nothing sinister into this. Dr Pace, having only been Director of Museums since 1999, may have no knowledge of the issue and was certainly in no way involved in the events themselves. However, it is disappointing not to have the benefit of his comments on this important question. Nor have I been able to confirm or refute the story by questioning F. S. Mallia, the former Director of Museums alleged to have ordered the removal of the bull figure. Unfortunately Dr Mallia passed away some years ago.
The strange case of the bison-bull (4)
The next step was to talk to D. H. Trump, now retired in Cambridge, so I prepared a list of questions for him and asked my assistant Sharif to find him and interview him. The recorded interview, which sheds some further light on the mystery, took place on 26 October 2001:
Sharif: In your Archaeological Guide – this is the main source I’m going on, the updated edition – you mention a bull in the Hypogeum and you say, ‘Pause to look at the wall opposite the stairs down to the lower storey. Dark lines of black paint outline what is apparently intended to be a bull. It is crudely done, and the head and shoulders have not survived. That it is ancient and intentional is shown by the fact that the ochre wash on the wall ceases exactly at the black line.’ Do you remember the bull I’m talking about?
Trump: I do indeed.
Sharif: OK, now in Dossier Malta, Mifsud alleges that …
Trump: That this was scrubbed out.
Sharif: Yes, he alleges that it was scrubbed out.
Trump: The very simple answer to that is what on earth would Francis Mallia have wanted to scrub it out for? Absolutely no motive for this. It was very slight indeed in the first place. It is known that there has been deterioration of the paint under the Hypogeum – this is what all the recent restoration work has been doing to try to stabilize the situation as it is now.
Sharif: So what’s the cause of the deterioration? Is it the tourists visiting the site, something in the air? Trump: Presumably, yes.
Sharif: Mifsud says that Mallia was a pupil of J. D. Evans.
Trump: Yes, he was sent back to study under Evans at the Institute of Archaeology in London, to give him the qualifications to take over the job.
Sharif: And the suggestion is that because Mallia was a pupil of J. D. Evans, he had a position that was somewhat contrary to your own position, such that you two entered into a disagreement about the significance of this bull. And it was following this disagreement between you and Mallia that Mallia ordered an employee of the Museum …
Trump: I don’t think the Museum knows anything about him.
Sharif: He was a nobody in terms of academia?
Trump: We don’t know who he was.
Sharif: Right, but what do you have to say about this general picture of a dispute between yourself and Mallia?
Trump: Well, as with all scholarship, we had slightly different views of this. I was more willing to accept this very faint figure than Mallia was. The bull figure. I wouldn’t regard this as a disagreement, we certainly didn’t squabble over the issue.
Sharif: So it was a difference in academic viewpoint?
Trump: Well yes. I was prepared to accept – by the way it was our curator there who pointed it out to us; no one had noticed it before; it was as faint as that. I looked at it and thought, ‘Well maybe there’s something in it.’ I wanted to put it into the Guide so that people could …
Sharif: Look for themselves …
Trump: Have a look and make up their own minds. Whereas Mallia was rather more dubious of it. But I wouldn’t put it more strongly than that. And to call it a disagreement is quite misleading.
Sharif: OK, so really the disagreement was that you thought it was of archaeological significance … Trump: I wouldn’t even put it as strongly as that. I thought it might be, he thought it probably wasn’t.
Sharif: So his view was that it was actually impossible to take anything from it – even to be sure that it was an ancient piece of art?
Trump: Yes.
Sharif: And your view was that it might be?
Trump: Yes.
Sharif: But you’d never seen it in a state of better preservation – from the outset it was rubbed off?
Trump: From the outset it was extremely faint. As I say, no one noticed it until our curator, who obviously was up and down passing it every day for years, spotted what he thought might be something, and pointed it out to the authorities at the museum. We went and had a look and said, ‘Well, maybe’ – but it was never any clearer than that.
Sharif: You’ve seen his figure yourself – what remains of it?
Trump: It was barely perceptible then, I wouldn’t … well it’s even less perceptible now.
Sharif: So have you seen the changes?
Trump: Oh yes.
Sharif: And those are the changes that the restoration project is trying to stop?
Trump: Yes.
Sharif: These are not deliberate changes – they’re changes that all tourist sites have to think about?
Trump: Yes, the question of the air conditioning and the like …
Sharif: Is there any part of this bull figure which leads you to think about Mifsud’s suggestion that it actually represents an extinct species? Is there enough of it left for you to tell that?
Trump: No.
Sharif: What do you think Mifsud is basing that on? He actually takes it as suggestive evidence of a Palaeolithic presence by saying that this is a Palaeolithic species painted in a Palaeolithic style.
Trump: Frankly, rubbish! The site wasn’t there – wasn’t excavated until long after the Palaeolithic.
Sharif: Right, how do we know that?
Trump: Well, from the archaeological content.
Sharif: From radiocarbon-dating of that content?
Trump: Well, not directly from the Hypogeum, which was excavated back in 1910 – long before radiocarbon. But there was no archaeological material, no pottery or anything out of the Hypogeum earlier than the Zebbug phase. Which, with radiocarbon, we’d now put at about 4000 BC. The chambers were deliberately excavated, but not before 4000 BC. So there’s no question of extinct Pleistocene species.
The strange case of the bison-bull (5)
Mifsud’s position, while the complete opposite of Trump’s, is not contradicted by the presence in the Hypogeum of materials only of the Zebbug phase and younger. As we saw earlier in this chapter he disputes the view that the Hypogeum was constructed as a place of burial and has presented evidence that the materials and skeletal remains found inside it by archaeologists were not deliberately placed there b
ut are a flood deposit carried in from surrounding Neolithic burial sites. The dating of those remains to the Neolithic Zebbug phases and younger is therefore exactly what Mifsud’s theory predicts and leaves effectively unchallenged the revolutionary possibility that lies at the heart of his analysis – i.e., that the structure itself may long pre-date the Neolithic. ‘Regarding the antiquity of the Hypogeum,’ he confirms:
my gut feeling is that there is strong evidence to show that it had originated in its function subserving the ancient Maltese in the Palaeolithic, and the bovine representation constitutes one of the main arguments for this.51
A re-evaluation
As well as the unresolved (and now probably unresolvable) question of the bison-bull with its possible pre-Magdalenian associations, Mifsud points to Malta’s Goddess cult as further support for his view that the islands’ prehistoric culture may have developed from very ancient Palaeolithic roots. The so-called ‘Sleeping Lady’ statues found in the Hypogeum and numerous ‘Venus’ figurines found throughout Malta’s megalithic temples leave little doubt that a form of Mother Goddess was the supreme deity worshipped in these mysterious places. But these artifacts ‘have all been attributed arbitrarily to the Neolithic’,52 even though they are distinctly characteristic of European Palaeolithic art forms, dating as far back at 30,000 BP.
In brief, Mifsud also draws attention to the following points:
Modern research into the Palaeolithic cave art of Europe ‘includes the study of wall configuration and their adaptation to the drawings, and to the significance of human voice resonance, a feature which immediately brings to mind the Oracle room of the Hypogeum’.53
The art forms in the Hypogeum call for a re-evaluation. ‘The designs in red ochre and black pigment draw strong parallels with Palaeolithic sites abroad. The red ochre designs have hitherto been traditionally assigned to a “tree of life” nature and dated arbitrarily to the Neolithic.’54
At the entrance to one of the Hypogeum’s painted rooms, the faint engraved impression of a large human hand, also arbitrarily assigned to the Neolithic, may still be seen. It ‘has parallels in similar designs in Palaeolithic sites at Gargas, El Castillo, and particularly with Montespan in the Franco-Cantabrian region.’55 The impression shows a hand with six fingers56 [a condition known as Polydactyly that is also seen on at least one of the ‘Fat Lady’ figures on show in the National Museum of Archaeology].57
Also of great interest is another Hypogeum design. It ‘is in the form of an ideogram and comprises a black and white chequered pattern; this simple geometric design is considered to represent an early stage of Palaeolithic art’.58
Last but not least, tests have been conducted on the red ochre pigments in the Hypogeum for their constituent mineral components. In 1987
samples were taken of red ochre pigment on rock from the north corner of the Oracle room, together with a rock sample without pigment from the same room. On the 26th of July these were examined at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC, at the Conservation Analytical Laboratory. Both samples were submitted to x-ray diffraction studies and the red ochre sample was also viewed through a scanning electron microscope. In keeping with the routine composition of Palaeo lithic art pigments, these samples confirmed the presence of the oxides of Silicon, Iron, Aluminium, Calcium, Potassium, Sodium and Magnesium.
An earlier study, carried out by Janusz Lehman in 1979, tested two samples of red ochre pigment from the decorations in the Hypogeum’s middle level. As well as all the above ingredients these samples contained traces of manganese dioxide, the main component of black. ‘This finding confirms that the red ochre design examined by Lehman had been superimposed upon an even earlier design in Palaeolithic black pigment.’59
None of this is to insist that all or even most of the designs inside the Hypogeum do in fact date back to the Palaeolithic – only that there is a significant possibility that some of them do.
That the Hypogeum was extensively used, and perhaps even developed and expanded during the Neolithic, and that this happened in more or less exactly the time-frame allocated to it by archaeologists (i.e., 3600–2500 BC) is not, I repeat not, in dispute here. But what is contested is any attempt to claim that the scholarly consensus explains everything about this dark and powerful labyrinth beneath the ground and that the ‘minor mysteries’60 of the Hypogeum’s true origins and antiquity have long been solved – ‘cleared out of the system’,61 by leading academics.
The consensus may be correct. But I believe Anton Mifsud has successfully demonstrated that important evidence contrary to the consensus does exist, has been overlooked and, in at least one case – the bison-bull – may actually have been extirpated like an idol brought before the Inquisition.
A pattern?
If a failure to preserve and consider potentially controversial evidence has frustrated a full understanding of the Hypogeum, then the same is also true for the megalithic temples and even the prehistoric cave sites in Malta. Thus, Mifsud points out that archaeologists excavating Ghar Dalam cave in the early twentieth century (see chapter 18 for a fuller treatment of Ghar Dalam) ‘discovered several knives, scrapers, borers and burins in previously undisturbed deposits, and although stratigraphically Pleistocene, they have been arbitrarily attributed to the Neolithic’.62
Likewise, there is the matter of twenty-six flint implements (flint is not native to the Maltese islands) which were excavated at Hagar Qim, also in the early twentieth century:
They are illustrated in Zammit’s The Valletta Museum [1931, plate facing page 21] but have since gone missing. The implements comprised blades and bladelets, microliths, scrapers and burins, all datable to the Upper Palaeolithic.63 [My emphasis.]
Probably there’s nothing to it. Still, it does seem bizarre that so much evidence with the potential to support a Palaeolithic human presence on Malta gets lost or damaged.
Finally, together with Charles Savona Ventura, Mifsud draws attention to the little-known Ghar Hasan cave located on a precipitous cliff-face on Malta’s south coast not far from the more famous Ghar Dalam.64 This cave was investigated in 1987 by a high-powered team of Italian archaeologists from the Centro Camuno di Studi Preistorici led by Emanual Anati, Professor of Palaeoethnology at Lecce University and a world authority on cave art. Anati has since issued a series of publications concerning Ghar Hasan, the most recent in 1995:65
For the first time in the long history of the cave, a repertoire of Palaeolithic art forms were partially uncovered from beneath the stalagmitic encrustations which covered them for the past fifteen millennia. The figures numbered altogether approximately 20 designs, and they are painted in red, brown, dark brown and black. They represent various animal figures, an anthropozoomorphic design, several handprints and an array of ideograms …
In Panel One, at least two of the animal figures represent the elephant, ‘two heavy quadrupeds with a long muzzle’. These animals were extinct in Malta before the end of the Pleistocene.66
The so-called ‘Pleistocene/Holocene boundary’ in geology coincides quite closely with the Palaeolithic/Neolithic boundary in archaeology. So what Anati’s expedition seemed to have found with these representations of extinct species in Ghar Hasan was more evidence of a Palaeolithic human presence on Malta.
Soon after news broke about these published conclusions and their stark contradiction of the orthodox view on Malta’s prehistory, the Italian team distanced itself from its initial Palaeolithic leanings and claimed instead that the depictions in Ghar Hasan are ‘out of context’ – which indeed they are if one is only prepared to countenance a Neolithic context for the earliest human presence in Malta.
Another development at about the same time was that the Ghar Hasan cave began to be vandalized, and the paintings defaced or completely removed, a process that continued over a long period. The result, which would have caused an international furore anywhere else but Malta, is that today:
The only depictions which have survived, unless mo
re are obscured by stalagmitic material on the cavern walls, are the two handprints in red pigment in Gallery D … Vandalism not of the popular type has destroyed and obscured the entire repertoire of images on the accessible areas.67
The best paintings described, photographed and published by Anati,68 were in the ‘Gallery A’ section of Ghar Dalam. Within a few weeks of the arrival in Malta of Anati’s publication, a steel gate was erected that restricted access to this section. Officially, the gate had nothing to do with Anati’s publication or the vandalism of the paintings, but was ‘for the protection of a small colony of bats’.69
The ghost of Piltdown Man
Rigorous scientist that he is, Anton Mifsud would be the first to admit that none of the clues, hints, anachronisms, anomalies and whispers of conspiracy that he has amassed from the Hypogeum and the megalithic temples of Malta are proof that these structures had a Palaeolithic origin. Certainly they are suggestive! But they prove nothing and they run entirely contrary to increasingly accurate C-14 evidence that archaeologists have had at their disposal since the 1950s – revolutionized by dendrochronology in the 1960s70 – which places the temple-building period within a definite time-band in the Neolithic (3600–2500 BC) and finds no evidence of any human presence in Malta at any date prior to 5200 BC, let alone as far back as the Palaeolithic.71 The earliest radiocarbon evidence of a definite human presence in Malta is from Ghar Dalam and gives a Neolithic date of around 5200 BC.72 The orthodox position is that no samples taken anywhere in the Maltese islands suggest any earlier date.