Who invented steps?

We come to rely on systems, and then when they fail we go back into the old ways of doing things. Arriving here on Tuesday, my mobile phone wouldn’t connect properly - no mapping. So we used Andrew’s which was working ok in that respect although I am wretchedly unfamiliar with its controls and habits… Still it got us to our destinations, and meanwhile I started to look at the road map I had had to buy at the airport. Three euros.  (They give you a very good free one when you pick up your hire care in Ireland. Same company, different generosity).  This 3€ map is printed on glossy thin paper and after being opened and folded a few times started to give way on the folds, and a remarkable amount of information on it is printed in such minuscule font that you can barely see it. It’s so bad, it’s almost worth starting a collection of bad maps to show up its uselessness.  

Anyway, with a week in front of us and no particularly pressing priorities, I asked if we could call in to see two temple complexes not far from where we are staying: Skorba and Ta’ Hagrat. These lie off the road we had taken to get to Mellieha, so with Andrew’s phone and my silly map it was easy-peasy.   I should say, getting familiar with place-names is not so straightforward because they are mostly rather Arabic, though spelled in Roman alphabet.  We had just about picked up that ‘Triq’ = road, or street, and that’s all. 

We found Skorba really easily and wandered in, through an open wire gate, but a man in a shed said we needed tickets and sent us back to ‘the bar on the corner’. The bar (at 11am) was chockablock with local people, almost all of whom were eating huge meals - spaghetti, lasagne, stewed rabbit, vast hamburgers.  The owner was frantically serving coffee from a large urn at the back of the bar, which was heated with a blazing gas burner.  He shouted out ‘Tickets?’ to us in a cheerful voice and then told us to wait while he dished up more coffees to people clustered at the counter.  We ordered coffees too, and he gave us our tickets and we went back to the the temple. 

    

The site is a small area, fenced off, about the size of a tennis court, and filled with a jumble and cluster of rocks and boulders; some are standing. It was apparently only excavated in the 1960s, and so had the benefit of modern analysis for the finds - they had discovered carbon-dating by then, whereas most other sites had been dug into in the 1920s or earlier, and so those places remain mysterious in some (almost all) respects. Skorba provided more solid dating evidence, which illuminated the rest of the island’s treasures. The published dates on the information boards are contradictory and awkward, nonetheless.   What’s clear is that there was first some kind of settlement, then a ‘temple’ which had the now-familiar triple-chamber layout, and that was much later adapted and changed, and then - who knows?  Here they found a beautiful goddess figurine, with breasts and a pubic triangle. The man did not know where this is now - presumably in the National Museum.   He had cut the grass around the stones, and it lay withering in the sun.  

We went on to the next temple - Ta' Hagrat.  Again, a wire fence, a man in a hut. He was Russian.  He asked to see our tickets, wanted to know when and where we had bought them. On inspection it seemed our tickets were dated 5th December last year, and expired on 4th March but he let us in anyway.   We were the only people there.  He said, moodily, people complain the temple is very small.   Actually it is not small, though it is cramped by its modern boundaries, and is placed on the side of a valley with nice views. This site is about twice the size of Skorba.  Here again is a jumble of stones, hard to make out at first.  This was just a farmer’s field until 1916 - he had moved a couple of great stones out of the way, and the archaeologists put them back where they thought they should go in the 1920s….The caption says "They increased the verticality of the entrance". That's a strange expression. It 'might' have been very low, like the doorways in the Sardinian nuraghi, or the great mounds at Newgrange in Ireland. It’s hard to say if their reconstruction is right, and we will never know.

   

But - my goodness! Here is something!  What they made was a really large impressive doorway, approached by a flight of massive steps. These are thought to be the earliest steps found, or something.   Now, this is a bit of a thrill for me, because I do wonder who invented steps.  I asked on Facebook and Twitter last year, and no-one answered. I know, I know, this is one of those questions which everyone thinks is so bleeding obvious that it’s ridiculous… but like all useful things, steps had to start somewhere. Any rocky slope may have inspired the idea, but someone, at some point, got other people to lug blooming great rocks into place to  create an even and easy walkway up or down.  This little flight of stones at Ta’ Hagrat may be the first one, or one of the first.  No goddess figurine found here, but at Ta’ Hagrat they found a remarkable little model temple carved in stone.  These structures and artefacts have their origins about 5000BC… the late Stone Age. Thus, they predate the Copper Age and the Bronze Age, when tools were changed into weapons, and the goddess gave way to a series of increasingly violent and assertive egoistical gods.   I have to be very wary of leaping to these conclusions, and they are not really conclusions but questions.  The layout at Ta’ Hagrat is even more strikingly 3-chambered… once symmetrical, then altered with a different alignment so that the right-hand chamber was elongated and became the entrance for three more smaller chambers…  

This is all very reminiscent of the nuraghi in Sardinia - but there, of course, the entrances for these Stone Age structures are really small, vaginal.  And they (like the Newgrange mounds) have small window over the doors, to let the winter solstice sun into the interiors.   This great doorway at Hagrat is now utterly different - but it was made in the 1920s, so who knows what it was like originally?   The moody Russian in the hut did not know about the nuraghi, but was interested.  He too had cut the grass which was drying in the sun. But some spectacular wildflowers were sprouting up, as everywhere... so beautiful. 

    

We headed back north, to view the spectacularly beautiful bay at Ghajn Tuffieha, which has a Gaia Peace Grove at the top of the cliff (complete with graphic warning signs of how dangerous it is on the crumbling edge).     We walked down the long long flight of steps (renewed at the lower end) to the beach and had lunch in a pretty little terrace bar under the terrifying cliffs. The tables have rough patterns carved into them, so reminiscent of the Hooked Diamond shape I love (the ancient textile design which goes back to the Stone Age) that I took it to be a sign of encouragement from my Goddess .... and then I found more on some decorative treetrunk sculptures near the pay desk.... though these came from Bali and have absolutely no connection with Malta other than fashionable stylishness.....

    

So, eschewing the long flight of steps, we strolled back up the old pathway which is evidently a river in the wet season.  We then went in search of the famous cart-ruts at the top of the Dingli cliffs, which have mystified historians… again dating from the Stone Age, they are ground into a rocky surface and may have been made by wheeled vehicles near some quarries, but their pathways are pretty random. We found the main area, but did not find the ruts, which was intensely disappointing…. (will have to go back).  The rocky surface looks pretty organic to me, with variations of surface looking entirely natural (memories of O-Level Geography, limestone pavements).    At some point in the afternoon, my phone started providing mapping but neither that nor the failing folding 3€ map showed us where the ruts are.  All I have is a small photo in a guide book.  

We dawdled home, calling into various little shops - bought some broad beans - came home, flumped.