Temples built up to 3,000 years before the Pyramids of Egypt – which were constructed around 2,500BC. When I visited Malta in 2023, I had to try and get my head round the fact that the temple ruins I was looking at dated back 5,000 years. Stone structures still standing with doorways aligned to catch the first light of the winter solstice. Intricate spirals carved into limestone with stone tools. What was this magnificent civilisation living on an island in the Mediterranean between modern Italy and Libya so long ago? And why hadn’t I heard of them?
Well, there’s a reason. An unsolved mystery. At around the time the Great Pyramid was being built in Egypt – these people vanished.
When the island was re-inhabited centuries later in the Bronze Age, the new arrivals found great temples but no worshippers. To this day, we wonder whether the temple builders boarded small boats and sailed away for some reason. Or were they wiped out by disease or violence? If you haven’t seen the temples of Malta, then you are missing out on something truly amazing. Let me tell you all about it.
A Civilization That Shouldn’t Exist
The Maltese archipelago — Malta, Gozo, and the tiny islet of Comino — sits in the middle of the Mediterranean, sixty miles south of Sicily, closer to North Africa than to mainland Europe. It is small, dry, and not especially rich in resources. It has no rivers. It has little timber. The soil is thin.
And yet, starting around 3600 BCE, the people living there built some of the most sophisticated prehistoric structures in the world.
The temples of Ġgantija on Gozo, Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra on the southern cliffs of Malta, the Tarxien complex in what is now a suburb of Valletta — these are not crude stone piles. They are architecturally complex buildings with curved outer walls, carefully shaped trilithon doorways, altars, apses, and forecourts. Some have corbelled ceilings. Some feature sophisticated acoustic properties, with inner chambers that amplify sound in ways researchers suspect were deliberate, used to create an overwhelming sensory experience during rituals.
The Ġgantija temples on Gozo, built around 3600–3200 BCE, are among the oldest freestanding structures in the world — older than Stonehenge, older than the Pyramids of Giza. UNESCO recognized them, along with the other Maltese temples, as a World Heritage Site.
The people who built them are known, somewhat blandly, as the Maltese Temple Period culture or the Ġgantija Phase people. They left no writing. We do not know what they called themselves, what language they spoke, or what they believed — at least not in words. What they left behind is stone, bone, and fired clay.
What the Bones and Figurines Tell Us
The underground hypogeum at Ħal Saflieni is simply mind blowing. I can’t share any images of my own because it’s forbidden to whip your smartphone out and take photos. However, this image is available for public use and gives you an idea of the breathtaking sight you encounter.
This structure is like an underground, art deco style mausoleum. It’s impossible to believe that it dates back to the stone age. The hypogeum is a rock-cut necropolis excavated to three levels deep into the limestone and held the remains of an estimated 7,000 people. The dead were placed there over centuries, in a space that feels designed to dissolve the boundary between the living and the dead, between this world and another. One unnerving fact is that archaeologists believe that at its height of operation, you moved around by walking over the bones of the dead. The whole place was knee deep in bodies.
Among the most haunting objects recovered from the temples and the hypogeum are the figurines: small clay and stone carvings of enormously fat, androgynous figures, reclining or seated, with creased rolls of flesh and a strange serenity. They are unlike anything else in the prehistoric Mediterranean. Some archaeologists read them as representations of gods or ancestors; others see them as symbolic of fertility, abundance, or transformation. The famous “Sleeping Lady,” found in the hypogeum, shows one of these figures lying on her side, eyes closed, in a pose that reads unmistakably as sleep — or death — or both.
Animal bones found at the temples show large-scale ritual feasting, particularly of cattle, sheep, and goats. This was a community that came together around meat and ceremony. Whether their society was governed by priests, chiefs, or something more egalitarian is debated. The absence of obvious elite burials — no individual interred with overwhelming wealth compared to others — has led some researchers to suggest a relatively non-hierarchical social structure, though this is speculative.
Here is another of the voluptuous women found at the temple sites.
The Disappearance
Around 2500 BCE, it ends. The temples are abandoned. The culture that built them vanishes from the archaeological record.
Then, after a gap that may have lasted a few centuries, new people appear on Malta — people with a clearly different material culture, using copper and later bronze, with different pottery styles and different burial customs. These are the people of what archaeologists call the Tarxien Cemetery phase and then the Borġ in-Nadur culture. They are genetically and culturally distinct from the Temple Period people.
The old temples were not torn down. They were not burned. They were simply left. The new arrivals, when they came, used the Tarxien temple site as a cremation cemetery — essentially treating the ancient buildings as a convenient open space, possibly without understanding what they had been.
So the question stands: what happened between 2500 BCE and the arrival of the new people?
The Theories
Several explanations have been proposed, and the honest answer is that we don’t know. The evidence supports a range of possibilities, and they are not mutually exclusive.
Environmental collapse. The most widely cited theory is that the Temple Period people destroyed their own ecological base. Malta and Gozo are small islands with limited agricultural land. Pollen analysis and soil studies suggest significant deforestation during the Temple Period, as land was cleared for farming and timber was harvested for construction and fuel. Without trees, the thin Mediterranean topsoil erodes quickly. Models suggest that by 2500 BCE, Malta may have been severely degraded — stripped of the forest cover that stabilized soil and retained rainfall, leaving an island that could no longer support the population it once had.
In this scenario, the temple-building culture was a victim of its own success. The population had grown large enough to require intensive agriculture, which required clearing land, which gradually undermined the agricultural base, leading eventually to food shortages and societal stress that the community could not survive intact.
Disease and demographic collapse. A population under nutritional stress is more vulnerable to infectious disease. Some researchers have noted that skeletal evidence from the hypogeum shows signs of health problems in the later Temple Period — dental decay consistent with a carbohydrate-heavy diet, signs of nutritional deficiency. A disease outbreak in an already-stressed population on a small island, with no possibility of retreat to uncultivated land, could be catastrophic.
Drought. The period around 2200–2000 BCE is associated with significant climate disruption across the Mediterranean and Middle East — a prolonged drought event that contributed to the collapse of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia and caused widespread disruption in Egypt and the Levant. Whether this climatic event touched Malta at the precise right moment to deliver the killing blow to an already-weakened society is unclear, but it fits the timeframe.
Violence and conflict. Some researchers have pointed to evidence of trauma on skeletal remains and the possibility that the Temple Period people were displaced or destroyed by outside groups. But the lack of clear evidence of destruction at the temple sites — no burned buildings, no weapons buried with the dead, no mass trauma graves — makes a conquest scenario harder to sustain. It cannot be ruled out, but it is not the leading explanation.
Emigration. A population under severe environmental pressure on a small island has another option that continental populations do not: they can leave. Malta is in the middle of a sea with coasts on multiple sides. If the island could no longer sustain the population, the Temple Period people may have simply packed their boats and left — dispersing into Sicily, North Africa, or elsewhere in the Mediterranean, where they would have been absorbed into larger populations, taking their culture with them only as faint traces that archaeology cannot yet detect. In this reading, the Temple Period people did not die; they dissolved.
The Silence in the Stone
What makes this disappearance so haunting is not just that it happened, but that it happened completely. These were sophisticated, organised people — capable of coordinating labor on a scale that required planning across generations, of developing a distinctive artistic and architectural tradition, of managing a complex ritual life. They were not a simple foraging band that could quietly vanish. They were a civilisation, small by later standards but a civilisation nonetheless.
And yet they left almost nothing recoverable beyond the stone. No words. No names. No stories that survived into the historical record. The myths of ancient Greece and Rome, which preserved echoes of many Bronze Age cultures, contain no whisper of the Maltese temple builders — probably because by the time literate Mediterranean culture emerged, the Temple Period had been over for two thousand years and the people had been forgotten even by those who came after.
The temples stood empty and slowly filled with windblown soil. Centuries passed. The new Bronze Age people arrived and used Tarxien as a place to cremate their dead, laying their ashes among the carved stone spirals of people they had no memory of.
Why It Matters
The Maltese Temple Period is often treated as a curiosity — a strange prehistoric anomaly in the middle of the sea. But it is something more important than that: it is a case study in the fragility of complex societies on small, resource-limited landscapes.
The Temple Period people were not primitive. They were, by the standards of their time and place, extraordinarily accomplished. They built monuments that have lasted longer than anything the Roman Empire left behind. And they collapsed anyway, most likely because the island they lived on could not sustain indefinitely what they had built.
Malta today is one of the most densely populated countries in Europe, sustained now by imported food, global trade, and tourism rather than by its own thin soil. The temples are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, carefully conserved under protective canopies, visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists a year. The island thrives, in ways its ancient inhabitants never could have imagined.
But the stone remembers. Stand inside Ħaġar Qim on a quiet morning, when the tour groups haven’t arrived yet, and the curved limestone walls hold a particular silence. Not emptiness — something more like held breath. The people who built this place are gone so completely that we cannot even mourn them properly, because we do not know their names.
We only know that they were here. That they built something extraordinary. And that one day, they weren’t here anymore.
NOTE ON THE AUTHOR:
Tony McMahon is an investigative historian often see on TV: https://tony-mcmahon.com/
He is the author of several books on different historical topics including the Knights Templar: https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/The-Knights-Templar-Hardback/p/51654
Tony is the co-host of the Talking Templars podcast on YouTube and other channels.
