It was for a long time believed that there were no dolmens in Malta. Professor Tagliaferro has been able to upset this belief by discovering two, one near Musta and the other near Siggewi. It is hardly credible that these are the only two dolmens which ever existed in Malta. More will no doubt yet be found, especially in the wild north-west corner of the isle.
The megalithic builders of Malta did not confine their achievements to structures above ground, they could also work with equal facility below. In the village of Casal Paula, which lies about a mile from the head of the Grand Harbour of Valletta, is a wonderful complex of subterranean chambers known as the Hypogeum of Halsaflieni, which may justly be considered as one of the wonders of the world.
The chambers, which seem to follow no definite plan, are excavated in the soft limestone and arranged in two storeys connected by a staircase, part of which still remains in place. The finest rooms are in the upper storey. The largest is circular, and contains in its walls a series of false doors and windows. It is in this room that the remarkable nature of the work in the hypogeum is most apparent. On entering it one sees at once that the intention of the original excavator was to produce in solid rock underground a copy of a megalithic structure above ground. Thus the walls curve slightly inwards towards the top as do those of the apses of Mnaidra and Hagiar Kim, and the ceiling is cut to represent a roof of great blocks laid across from wall to wall with a space left open in the centre where the width would be too great for the length of the stones. The treatment of the doors and windows recalls at once that of the temples above ground. The mason was not content, when he needed a door, to cut a rectangular opening in the rock; he must represent in high relief the monolithic side-posts and lintel which were the great features of the megalithic 'temples' of Malta. Nor has he failed in his intention, for, as one moves from room to room in the hypogeum, one certainly has the feeling of being in a building constructed of separate blocks and not merely cut in the solid rock. No description can do justice to the grace of the curves and the flow of the line in the circular chamber and in the passage beyond it, and we have here the work of an architect who felt the æsthetic effect of every line he traced.
Behind the circular chamber and across the passage just referred to lies a small room which, rightly or wrongly, has been called the 'Holy of Holies,' the idea being that it formed a kind of inner sanctuary to the chamber. It contains a rough shelf cut in the wall, and in the centre of this a shallow circular pit. It has been suggested that this pit was made to hold the base of the cult-object, whether it was a baetyl or an idol. This, however, is a mere conjecture. In the passage just outside the door of this room are two small circular pits about 6 inches in diameter and the same distance apart. They connect with one another below, and are closed with tightly fitting limestone plugs. In one of them was found a cow's horn. Their purpose is unknown, but similar pairs of pits occur elsewhere at Halsaflieni.
In two of the largest chambers in the hypogeum the roof and walls are still decorated with designs in red paint. The patterns consist of graceful combinations of curved lines and spirals. Many other rooms, including the circular chamber, were originally painted with designs in red, which have now almost wholly disappeared.
Many of the chambers are extremely small, too small for an adult even to stand upright in them, and their entrances are merely windows, perhaps a foot square and well above the ground.
What then was the purpose of this wonderful complex of rooms? Before attempting to answer this question we must consider what has been found in them. When the museum authorities first took over the hypogeum practically all the chambers were filled to within a short distance of their roofs with a mass of reddish soil, which proved to contain the remains of thousands of human skeletons. In other words, Halsaflieni was used as a burial place, though this may not have been its original purpose. The bones lay for the most part in disorder, and so thickly that in a space of about 4 cubic yards lay the remains of no less than 120 individuals. One skeleton, however, was found intact, lying on the right side in the crouched position, i.e. with arms and knees bent up.
With the bones were found enormous quantities of pottery and other objects, buried with the dead as provision for the next world. The pottery is rough in comparison with the fine painted wares of Crete, but it is extremely varied in its decoration. One particularly fine bowl shows a series of animals which have been identified by Professor Tagliaferro as the long-horned buffalo, an animal which once existed on the northern coasts of Africa. Ornaments of all kinds were common, and include beads, pendants, and conical buttons of stone and shell. The most remarkable of all are a large number of model celts made of jadeite and other hard stones. These are of the same shape as the stone axes used by neolithic man, but they are far too small ever to have been used, and they must therefore have been models hung round the neck as amulets. Each is provided with a small hole for this purpose. The popularity of the axe-amulet makes it probable that the axe had some religious significance.
Finally Halsaflieni has yielded several steatopygous figurines. Some of these resemble those of Hagiar Kim, but two are of rather different type. Each of these represents a female lying on a rather low couch. In the better preserved of the two she lies on her right side, her head on a small uncomfortable-looking pillow. The upper part of her body is naked, but from the waist downwards she is clad in a flounced skirt which reaches to the ankles. The other figurine is very similar, but the woman here is face downwards on the couch.