Giants of Malta
THE ALIENS BEHIND THE MEGALITHS
OPEN
In 1985, pediatrician Anton Mifsud got a frantic call from his contractor. The doctor was in the middle of excavating a site for his new medical clinic. Mifsud was hoping they didn’t need more equipment - they were isolated on Gozo, one of two main islands in the Maltese archipelago. The nearest mainland was the Italian coast, 60 miles away by boat. But Mifsud quickly realized this wasn’t about equipment. The contractor sounded worried - afraid even. Mifsud wondered if someone got hurt. He got the contractor to calm down and tell him what happened. Turns out, workers found the bones of a human in the ground. The doctor said they should just call the police. But the contractor said there was more to it. The skeleton they found was nearly ten feet in length.
The doctor said that was impossible - no human ever lived who was that enormous. Then he remembered the legend.
THE NIGHT OF SANSUNA
It was late on a Winter night, on the island of Malta, in 3600 BC. A Farmer was awakened by a strange orange glow from the entrance of his hut. His family was fast asleep along the back walls. No need to alert them - not until he figured out what this was. It should have been pitch black out there - the moon was just a sliver in the sky. But that glow was growing brighter.
The Farmer stepped through the low entrance and stood at the edge of his wheat field staring up at the stars. What he saw was incredible: a fireball slowly moving across the night sky. He’d seen meteors before. But they came in bunches. This was a single large object blazing a path through the darkness. And it was getting bigger. That’s when he had a shiver of fear. The trajectory of the thing - it was headed straight for the island. He thought about warning his family but there was no time. The fireball was going to hit. Seconds later it made impact. Just beyond the valley a bright flash lit up the island and the sea beyond. Then the darkness returned, followed by a low thunder that echoed against the sea cliffs. Then nothing.
The Farmer’s wife stepped out of the hut, afraid. He turned to comfort her: whatever it was had crashed. The danger was over. But she wasn’t looking at him. She was staring at something behind him, in the direction of the crash.
The Farmer turned around to see a huge figure rising from the woods where the fireball landed. A dark silhouette standing higher than the trees.
The Giant called Sansuna had arrived.
She claimed to be from a race of beings called the Nephilim. And despite her overwhelming size and strength, she earned the trust of the locals. There were just a few thousand people on the isolated islands. Generations before, their ancestors made the three day journey across the Mediterranean sea from Sicily. And they made a life on the rocky islands - the largest known today as Malta, the smaller called Gozo.
There was just enough grassland to raise animals and grow basic crops.
But now, with the arrival of this Giantess, the Maltese had a powerful being promising to keep them safe.
Sansura saw the land was abundant with huge limestones. To the Maltese people, the stones were too enormous to use. The biggest stones weighed 20 tons and stood 16 feet high. This was 5,000 years ago - they had no metal tools or even the wheel to help them. But Sansura was able to pick them up and carefully place them, one by one, until enormous temples were assembled, with walls three stories high.
Malta has two kinds of limestone rock: coralline, which is hard and durable, and globigerina, which is softer and more workable because it’s composed of the microscopic shells of sea life.
Sansura used the coralline to build outer walls and the softer globigerina for the interiors, where the Maltese people carved decorative designs.
As she assembled thirty different megalithic temples, Sansura fed herself on broad beans grown in the farmer’s fields. To eat her food, the Giantess carved a giant bowl from a single massive stone. The Farmer marveled at its size - his entire family could sit in it.
To show their devotion to Samsura, the locals built a statue in her honor - a ten foot high tribute.
The most impressive temple Sansura built was on the smaller island of Gozo, one of two in the isolated archipelago. The farmers named the temple Ggantija - the Maltese word for “giant”. It’s composed of two separate stone buildings, using enormous coralline limestone blocks. To this day, Ggantija still stands on Gozo.
But in the passing centuries, the work of Sansura became the stuff of myth. No one believed it. The idea of a giantess walking the islands, moving limestone around, was too fantastical.
Until they found the bones.
GIANT BONES
The megalithic temples on Malta and Gozo were left ignored for thousands of years. People assumed they were like Stonehenge or the Egyptian pyramids, other ancient monuments built with large stones - the literal meaning of “megalithic”.
The islands were not ignored at all. They had strategic value for every great civilization in world history. It makes sense. The islands are 60 miles from Italy and 180 miles from North Africa, right in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.
The Phoenicians were the first empire to claim Malta. Then the Romans. Then the Byzantines took over. The Arabs were next. Finally, in 1019, Malta was captured from the Arabs by King Roger the First of Sicily. From that point, Malta was under Christian rule. In 1530 the Holy Roman Emperor assigned the Knights of St. John to protect Malta.
And the leader of the Knights was the first person in a long time to note the islands were chock full of ancient temples.
He was a nobleman named Gian Abela. With the islands well-protected, Abela had time to investigate his surroundings. He became known for collecting archeological artifacts, and documenting the sites of the megalithic temples. Most were buried in debris from centuries of neglect. The roofs were gone. But the enormity of the sites was clear.
Abela couldn’t help but wonder - how could these oversized temples have ever been built? His ability to uncover the answers was limited. He wasn’t a true archeologist - in fact, in the early 17th century, no one knew how to properly excavate a site. If artifacts were found, it was often by accident. Which is exactly what happened to Abela.
A construction worker came to him, excited by something he found in a rock fissure. Abela went to see, and suddenly the answer of who built the giant structures was clear as day: it was a giant.
The worker handed Abela a femur bone, the largest bone in the human leg. Only the one found by the worker was twice as large as a normal human. By Abela’s calculations, a person with a femur that big would be nearly ten feet tall.
Soon, Abela had workers all over the island hunting. And by 1647, he had enough bones to publish the pioneering work that made him famous as “the Father of Maltese History”.
The book documented skull fragments, giant femurs and tibias, impossibly large vertebrae, and enormous pelvic bones. His conclusion was that the Maltese temples were built by a race of giants that inhabited the islands in prehistoric times. It only bolstered his theory that local legends also claimed the temples were the work of a giant.
Abela made the bones available for all to see. He transformed his home into Malta’s first public museum.
In 1644 Danish anatomist Thomas Bartholin visited the museum. He agreed the large bones must have belonged to “gigantic humans”.
Skeptics insisted the bones belonged to extinct animals. After all, giants didn’t exist. Mainstream scientists assumed the temples would be fully excavated someday, uncovering proof of who really built them.
And centuries later, proper archaeological excavations were done. But what they uncovered only added to the mystery.
UNCOVERING THE GIANT
In 1915, a Maltese farmer was trying to plow his field, but he kept hitting large blocks of stone. So he complained to the director of the Malta Museum, Sir Temi Zammit. Zammit examined the field, expecting more temple remains. But this new find seemed like something quite different. The farmer should have kept his mouth shut, because his complaint prompted a huge dig in his field. Zammit ordered the first excavation on Malta following standard scientific techniques of the day. That meant carefully removing dirt using trowels and brushes, one layer of soil at a time. Because each layer reveals a period in history through its contents.
After days of excavation, it became clear they found a statue. Or the remains of one. The top had been destroyed long ago. But the bottom was there: Two giant legs and feet. And there appeared to be the hem of a skirt left before the statue was damaged. Zammit recognized the design carved in the hem. It matched images of a female goddess found in ancient Maltese clay sculpture. He had many examples in his own museum. Only judging by the feet and legs, this statue must have been over ten feet tall.
Zammit had uncovered the Giantess of Malta.
* * *
Workers kept digging, and what was a buried statue turned out to be much more. The statue was in the middle of a complex group of megalithic temples. Zammit uncovered one of the most significant and impressive archaeological sites in Malta. They’re known as the Tarxien Temples - four structures in all, each with a distinctive layout.
And with every new detail they found, Zammit had a growing feeling nothing there made sense.
The temples were made from limestone blocks that weighed several tons. Even the floors were massive stone slabs aligned perfectly together.
The doorways were even more impressive: two upright stones a stunning ten feet in height were placed on either side, with a single multi-ton block placed across the top.
The obvious question plaguing Zammit: how did farmers on a remote island do this?
If it was just the Tarxien Temple Complex, the accomplishments of these ancient Maltese people would be nearly incomprehensible. But Zammit oversaw the excavation of nearly thirty different temple sites. All megalithic - all made with enormous limestone, stacked in close-fitting slabs. And arranged in cloverleaf floor plans only visible from above.
The roofs were missing, destroyed long ago - victims of all those great civilizations that ruled the island. Zammit assumed they were made of wood and grass, something the farmers could easily construct. Until he examined the walls at Tarxien and another megalithic temple excavated at Mnajdra:
Where the uppermost stones survived, they tilted inwards. Zammit felt a sharp fear in his gut - he knew what the tilt indicated. It made everything he was seeing more improbable. A normal roof supporting wood beams might slope outwards, to carry the weight of the beams. But an inward tilt suggested there was an arch, where stone blocks locked into a slope. This required stones to be placed and held until a keystone was fitted at the top of the curve. How the highest stones could possibly have been set in place by the ancient farmers, Zammit couldn’t guess.
The statue of the Giantess was looming in his mind. But he was the highly respected Museum Director. He needed a serious answer. He pushed the idea of giants out of his mind - it was absurd.
Then they found the bowl.
* * *
To this day, it’s one of the most notable artifacts from the Tarxien Temples: a bowl carved from a single block of stone. Looks like something you’d use to have some soup, maybe your morning cereal. Only it was big. Really big. Zammit stood next to it and the top of the bowl was as high as his waist. It measures four feet high and nine feet wide. If you travel to Malta, you can see it for yourself. It was recently restored and is on display in the Tarxien ruins.
No one knows what it was for. Food preparation? Grain storage? Decoration? Zammit again found himself pushing away thoughts of the Giantess. The legends were just stories.
The explanation for all the temples and artifacts must lay overseas. The megaliths were certainly part of a trend in the ancient world that gave us the Pyramids, or Stonehenge. Expert stone masons and stone cutters could easily make the short sail across the Meditteranean to the isolated islands. That would make all these structures possible. That’s what Zammit told himself.
Until he began dating the artifacts. And his whole time line blew up.
A TROUBLING TIMELINE
The Egyptian Pyramids, Stonehenge, and other known megalithic structures in Zammit’s time were built around 2600 BC. The Bronze Age. Makes sense, since the Bronze age brought on the widespread use of, well, bronze tools. Stone cutting was much improved by bronze chisels, saws, drills, hammers, and wedges. Zammit assumed these tools and the skilled men who used them found their way to Malta.
But when he examined the layers of soil in the Tarxien dig, the strata told a different story. There was a layer of soil from the Bronze Age overlying the Tarxien Megaliths. Meaning it was above it. Chronologically, that put the Megaliths some time before the Bronze age.
That simple fact changed everything. It meant the temples originated before any experts in stone cutting arrived to launch the era of temple building. Sure, the ancient Maltese farmers worked with stone to build shelters. But they had no expertise in turning huge blocks of limestone into megalithic architecture. Until they did. Something intervened.
* * *
Zammit looked for evidence in the artifacts he’d collected, mostly tools and pottery. Examining the layers of soil he put together a history of ancient Malta.
The earliest pottery had a smooth surface with bright colors - first red pigments, then blacks and yellows. This trend began with the first settlers on Malta, some time in the Neolithic period, the Stone Age. And the style lasted for two thousand years.
But then came a change. Zammit called it the Ggantija period, because it happened at the time the stone temples arrived. Zammit estimated it was around 3600 BC. Suddenly the inhabitants began to build enormous temples. And in the strata, remants of a new style of pottery suddenly showed up. The decorations on the pottery featured light, scratched lines with converging and diverging curves. Zammit immediately knew what they meant to depict. But it was one of his workers said it out loud: the design looked like a comet.
* * *
Of course, Zammit’s dating ability was limited to the science of his time. Dating artifacts based on the layers of soil is actually pretty accurate - old stuff gets buried by new stuff, hard to argue with that. But people did. Plenty of scholars at the time disagreed, placing the megalithic monuments in the Bronze Age. This made more sense given the amount of stone structures in Europe at the time. But in 1946, a revolutionary method of dating objects was developed. And the debate was ended for good.
CARBON 14
It’s a biological fact all living things absorb carbon and convert it to carbon dioxide. It happens constantly, as long as the living thing is, well, living. Once a thing is dead, no knew carbon is absorbed. The carbon remaining in the tissue is left to die as well. Only carbon decays much slower than dead animals or plants. Glacially slow. It takes 5,730 years for Carbon 14 to decay by half - known as the half life. In another 5,730 years, half of what remains is gone. After 60,000 years, there’s not enough carbon 14 left to measure. And no matter what the organic material is - dead plant, dead animal, human bones, even a piece of ancient wheat - Carbon 14 decays at exactly the same pace.
In 1949, Professor Willard Libby realized this strange fact of nature could be used to date things back 60,000 years with stunning accuracy. Which meant he could tell you how old organic material was back to the stone age. Based simply on how much carbon 14 was left compared with other forms of carbon that don’t decay. It just worked. And mainstream science jumped on it. The method spread to archaeology, geology, atmospheric science - anyone who needed to unlock the age of an object. It’s how we know the Egyptian Pharaoh Khufu was alive in 2600 BC. And it’s how we know Temi Zammit was dead-on about the megaliths on Malta.
After testing organic material and limestone in Zammit’s excavations, the Temples were confirmed to originate around 3600 BC. Before the Bronze Age, as Zammit predicted. In fact, they originated a thousand years before the Pyramids even existed. Before Stonehenge. Heck - before the wheel was used by humans.
Somehow, on this isolated island, farmers with stone age tools and no known way to move twenty-ton blocks of limestone, constructed gigantic megalithic temples for the world to see.
The mystery drove Zammit to re-read the original legends. He had them documented in the National Museum of Archaeology. The ancient settlers of Malta told of a giantess called Sansuna. They claimed she carried huge stones for miles, sometimes with an infant on her shoulder. She built the temples herself, living off wide beans and honey. Neolithic age farmers said Sansuna arrived on a blazing comet from the stars. According to folklore, the giantess said she was from another race called the Niphilim.
Now, Zammit was a well-educated man. He graduated as a Doctor from the University of Malta. He practiced in bacteriology in the great cities of Europe. Now he was Director of the National Museum.
But he wasn’t entirely sure what the Niphilim referred to - it wasn’t any culture he’d heard of before.
When he looked it up, he found himself wishing he’d never learned.
NEPHILIM RISING
They’re mentioned in the Book of Genesis. They’re described as warriors who were large and strong. That’s where Zammit first found a reference to the Nephilim. But he had to turn to a book outside the official Bible to get the full story: The Book of Enoch didn’t make it into the Catholic canon. But it was revered in Jewish communities. And in this book was a story about the origins of evil. It starts with a group of Angels called The Watchers. There were two hundred of them, led by an Angel named Semjaza. They were entrusted by God to act as heavenly overseers, ensuring order and guidance among mankind. But when they arrived and saw humanity first hand, the Watchers realized how much more powerful they were. These Angels had desires of domination. They had a streak of rebellion, tempted to take actions forbidden by divine law. They took an oath among themselves and decided they would take human wives. This turned out to be a very bad decision. The Watchers were cast out from heaven, bound in chains, and forced to live for eternity in the depths of the Earth.
But their evil lived on. The Watchers and their human wives had offspring. These hybrid beings were mighty giants. And they were left to walk the Earth. These were the Niphilim.
According to the Book of Enoch, these giants wreaked havoc on Earth, and are the true reason God created the Flood. He meant to “destroy the children of the Watchers from amongst men”.
Of course, if the Niphilim were destroyed in the Flood, they’d be long gone before the early Maltese farmers settled on the island.
But in the Book of Numbers there is another chapter in this story. Moses sends spies to explore the land of Canaan. And their report back suggests these Giants may have survived the Flood. According to Numbers, “The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are of great height. And there we saw the Nephilim, and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”
Zammit had his answer. Sansuna was a demigod stranded on the island. A giant who survived biblical floods. Who was looking to continue its species. Luckily, it seemed the giant was unable to have more offspring. Except maybe she had — that would explain the skulls.
SANSUNA’S CHILDREN
In 1902, the British navy was expanding its base in Malta’s Grand Harbor. At the time, the island was the primary base for the British Mediterranean Fleet. Which meant it was one of Malta’s biggest employers. To accommodate all the new workers, housing developments broke ground on the island’s fields. And if it wasn’t for this construction, the best preserved temple on Malta might never have been uncovered. Because it was entirely underground.
Construction workers cutting cisterns for houses accidentally cut into the ground - and the field gave way underneath them. Suddenly they were looking into the deep darkness of an enormous chamber. Rough excavations followed, revealing a subterranean maze of burial chambers and ossuaries - containers meant for holding the bones of the dead. Ultimately, they brought in an expert to do a proper excavation. And Temi Zammit arrived on the scene.
He called the site the Hal Saflieni Hypogem. Which sounds much fancier than it is. Hal Saflieni was the ancient village that used to be on the field. Hypogem is literally “underground” in Greek.
What Zammit found in there mirrored the megolithic temples that stood on land. There were the same limestone walls and doorways, the same slate floors. The Hypogem was a series of oval chamber halls, with niches in the walls, probably space for bodies. And just as his team marveled at the size of the underground world, they discovered this was just the first level. There were two more underneath.
The above ground temples were beaten down from centuries of conquering civilizations. The Hypogem was a treasure trove of well preserved artifacts. One of the standouts was a terracotta figure of that giantess - she seemed to be everywhere on that island. But this ceramic sculpture had her sleeping, in the same fringed skirt as the ten foot statue. It remains one of the most talked about pieces in the Museum today. But the Hypogem was clearly a burial site. And that meant there would be bones.
Zammit recovered remains of more than 7,000 individuals. Some of the bodies dated back to the Neolithic period.
He methodically catalogued every bone they found. Until he got to a group of skulls he couldn’t catalogue. There were twelve of them. And they were clearly abnormal. The skulls were elongated as if the heads were a completely alien shape.
Zammit asked scientists from Italy to help examine the skulls. They confirmed the strangely long cranium was natural - not the result of bandaging or boards, or stone age medical procedures. But even stranger than the elongated shape was the absence of the median suture. Every human skull has a seam between the two parietal bones. Basically, it divides the skull in half. Except these had no seam at all. Which is impossible, if you ask anatomists. That seam is part of human development during infancy.
In 1920, National Geographic magazine reported that the first inhabitants of Malta were an alien race with elongated skulls.
Zammit would have called that crazy. Except he couldn’t explain them otherwise. Until he realized a new possibility. That maybe these skulls belonged to the offspring of that sleeping lady. Were these the children of the Giantess? Nephilim born again to wreak more havok on the world?
Zammit put the skulls on display, for all to see. Maybe he was hoping someone would see them and give him a more comforting explanation. The skulls remained there until 1985. After that, for some reason, the Heritage Foundation on Malta made them unavailable without an appointment. But they insist these elongated skulls were not alien in nature. There was even an exhibit at the National Museum called “Alien Headaches” attempting to dispel those persistent rumors.
The problem is, no one is saying what they were.
But in his heart, Zammit knew. The Giantess of Malta had plans to live on.
END
The thirty temples on Malta and Gozo remain a mystery. No one knows for sure who built these structures - or why. They remain among the earliest free-standing structures in the world. The folklore focuses on giants. But the giant bones found by Abela in the 1600’s turned out to be from dwarf elephants, not actual giants. The complexity and sheer engineering marvel of the megalithic temples is a tribute to those neolithic farmers. Because somehow, with primitive tools and ingenuity, they assembled massive buildings that still stand, 5,000 years later.
Temi Zammit still has artifacts on display at the museum he founded in Malta’s capital. The main hall of the University of Malta now bears his name. And Zammit’s likeness is depicted on two commemorative Maltese coins. In 1930 he was knighted, and he published the definitive history of Malta. Indeed, because of his hard work and passion for Malta, Zammit remains the island’s true giant.
