Megalithic temple

What it is

Apsidal temples with megalith walls weighing up to 50 tonnes and corbelled vaulting, the oldest freestanding religious buildings in the world. Built by an island society with no metal or wheel.

A World Heritage Site; the spherical stone rollers found suggest a transport system of their own.

What it led to

• Organised religion with its own architecture and ritual specialists on a small island
• Engineering with stone rollers and levers for colossal blocks
• Ecological unsustainability: the collapse of the temple culture around 2500 BCE

Built on

• Seaborne colonisation with livestockc. 8500 BCE
• Polished stone axec. 8000 BCE
• Megalithic architecture (passage grave and menhir)c. 4800 BCE
• Atlantic megalithic architecture

Made possible

• Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum
• Tarxien and Ħaġar Qim temples

Links