Malta’s prehistoric record

For many years we have been claiming that Malta’s prehistoric temples were the world’s oldest free-standing stone architecture. It was necessary to specify ‘free-standing’, as some of Western Europe’s megalithic tombs, their structures buried in mounds of earth or loose stones, were a few centuries earlier.

With the discovery of the site of Göbekli Tepe in southeast Turkey in 1994, the claim could no longer be made. It dates to 9,000 BC.

However, more evidence has since been published, notably in the latest number of the journal Antiquity last month, that the buildings there, remarkable though they are for both their date and their relief carvings, are not free-standing. They are dug into an artificial mound, their walls consist of a single face of stone retaining the packing behind.

As a result, we can continue to claim proudly that our temples are now once more rightly the world’s first free-standing stone architecture – at least until such time as other claimants are discovered, of course.