ABSTRACT
The third point which strongly confirms this high initial dating is the absence of all trace of metal from the culture: it inevitably suggests beginnings early enough to be here beyond reach of metal, and so requiring an exclusive reliance on stone tools which became protected by a ritual tabu. For the island’s relations with Neolithic Sicily, attested in imported stones and Lipari obsidian and, recalling the suggestion (p. 84) of Eastern affinities there too, in some pottery-parallels with Stentinello, were succeeded by a much stronger influence from the Siculan-Italian-Balkan Chalcolithic, and metal finds would otherwise be inevitable when the growing maritime intercourse of around 2500 and after was bringing in not only Aegean pottery-forms and bossed bone ornaments like those of Troy and Castelluccio, but a Balkanic enlargement of the potters’ decorative repertory in incised, hatched, and punched designs, coloured inlay to reproduce painting, and above all the spiral. The three temples of Hal Tarxien form a proved chronological series, and while the stones of the first are plain, apse-entrances in the second display spirals in relief (as do some tomb-slabs at Castelluccio), which in the third have been developed in a unique stalk-like branching design, reappearing not only on pottery but in the roof-painting of the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum. But all such reflexions of the outer world in the Maltese temple-culture cease after Early Minoan times; though some of the pottery from Borg-enNadur in the south of the island has a late look in its heavily incised ornament, the great temples were at last utterly abandoned, and when a Bronze Age cremation-cemetery of the
second millennium was established over the ruins of Tarxien, their floors lay buried under three feet of sterile silt. The Bronze Age pottery has reminiscences of Borg-en-Nadur, and Malta may never have been wholly deserted, but the cemeterymaterial as a whole really recalls rather the Bronze Age of Sardinia; and, indeed, before this gap of some five centuries which so plainly bespeaks the end of third-millennium seafaring to the Maltese sanctuaries, Sardinia was already closely connected with Malta, as with Sicily and Italy, in the intercourse which that seafaring spread throughout the Middle Mediterranean.
