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METAGEUM '07
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Conference session: Astronomical alignments of Mnajdra Temple
Film & discussion: The Tal Qadi Stone
Book now for whole or part of the Metageum event. |
About Chris Micallef
Dr Ing. Chris Micallef, B.Mech.Eng(Hons), Eur.Ing, MBA, PhD is, by profession, both a warranted engineer and teacher. He is currently HR manager at the Employment and Training Corporation. Chris started his filming career with his father Maurice way back in 1976 at the age of nine in The boy and the red ball, which won him the best actor award. This was repeated again in 1980 in My Brother’s Keeper. Since 1985 Chris has produced four fiction films, one experimental and ten documentaries, winning several awards both locally and abroad.
Inspired by his late uncle, Paul Micallef, Chris has invested a great deal of time and careful attention to investigating the astronomical alignments of the Maltese temples, especially Mnajdra. Starting at a time when there was intense scepticism about such alignments amongst the archaeological establishment, Chris and his father and uncle have been vindicated in their central claim that these temples were aligned with the heavenly bodies. By recording on the film the precise illumination of the internal stones of Mnajdra at sunrise on the solstices and equinoxes, they proved to more conservative elements in the archaeological community that the alignments are real. Chris Micallef presented his finding at the OTSF conference (organised by Linda Eneix) in 2003 (Investigation and demonstration of astronomical alignments at Mnajdra temples).
Nowadays, Heritage Malta actually runs a ticketed event for people to view the sunrise alignments on the solstices and equinoxes. The photograph on the right is from the 2007 autumn equinox.
Mnajdra
The Mnajdra temple is the most complex of the extant Neolithic temples in Malta. It was designed with ingenuity to capture numerous alignments of celestial bodies with points in the stone. It requires dedicated effort to discover and confirm these alignments. In any given year clouds may obscure the in the crucial few minute of sunrise, and so it can take years to get good sightings and photographs. The remarkable photograph below, by Chris Micallef, shows the sun just above the horizon at the Spring equinox, shining directly through the main entrance of Mnjadra temple and along the axis of the main corridor. Photographic data such as this provide dramatic proof of the deliberate and careful alignment of the temple.
Films
Using both their video recordings and still photographs of sunrise and sunset, and moonrise and moonset, together with documentary footage and (pre-)historical reconstruction, the Micallefs put together a full-length film on the Mnajdra temple in 1999. A few years, with improved film equipment, they made a new film on the enignmatic stone found at the Tal Qadi neolithic temple in the north of Malta.
The Tal-Qadi Stone (in Maltese: il-Gebla ta' Tal-Qadi), is a One Television documentary produced by Chris Micallef and his father Maurice Micallef, has been awarded Best Director Award-Documentary in the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival which was held in Los Angeles between 1st and 8th March 2007. The documentary was the only Maltese entry in this festival, which also screened 88 productions from around the world. (See The Sunday Times of Malta, of 1st April 2007, page 28.)
Copies of the DVD Tal-Qadi Stone can be purchase in both the Maltese language and English. A stock of this video on DVD will be available at the Metageum conference bookstall. The DVD will be shown in full at 2:30 pm on Thursday 8th November, followed by a discussion with Chris Micallef.
About the Tal Qadi Stone
Summary:
The Tal-Qadi stone has always been an archaeological enigma amongst scholars. It has always been thought that this broken fan-shaped artefact represents stars and crescent moon. But is this so? The objective of this paper is to investigate deeper and analyse possible scenarios that may help to decipher the code of the Tal-Qadi stone.
For full information about the Tal-Qadi stone, and the film on it, please visit the web site www.one.com.mt/talqadi/.
The Tal-Qadi stone itself
At a small temple of Tal-Qadi, near Burmarrad, a broken fan-shaped stone was found, with very interesting features. The dimensions of this stone are 29 X 24cm and is 5cm thick (11.5 x 9.5 inches). From an observation point, this broken-shaped fan stone has carved radiating lines, which apparently depicts stars and crescent moon (Ridley, 1971). There are five segments in the Tal-Qadi stone. The fist segment has three lines in the shape of number one and one symbol which seems to represent a star, the second segment has seven stars, and three lines in the shape of number one. The third segment has the representation of crescent moon, the fourth segment has nine stars and 2 lines in the shape of the letter I, and the fifth segment has eight stars. It is difficult to give an interpretation of the number ones and letter I’s. It seems that stars were going to be engraved on the Tal-Qadi stone in this position but this is pure speculation. Richard England, Malta’s leading architect had studied the possible use of notches in the hills around the temples as horizon markers for observation of the moon and stars by Neolithic sky-watchers, along the lines found in northern Europe.
The Tal Qadi temple
According to Sir Themistocles Zammit, the Tal-Qadi ruins were first brought to light by a certain Henry Sant who worked as a Government civil engineer. The Tal-Qadi temple is situated on the right-hand side of Mdawra road to Salina Bay. Between 11th May and 15th September 1927, excavations were carried on this site. These were first supervised by L. Upton Way and later directed by Temi Zammit. The shallow soil and lack of megaliths made it quite difficult to follow the ground plan of the temple. Zammit had recorded this excavation period in the Museum Annual Report 1927-28, and a plan of the remains was made in 1952.
The main features are the outline of two apses of the temple, whose main axis evidently ran from east to west. According to Evans the temple was of the four-apse type, since there are some remains of a corridor to the east of the two surviving apses, which probably lead to a second pair. However nothing remains, except for four horizontal slabs which lie about four metres to the east of the corridor, and which may have been paving. One of the most difficult assertions is to determine whether the temple faced west or east. According to the report of the excavations, Zammit believes that the temple was oriented towards the west. Contrary to the hypothesis that the main entrance of the temple faced west, are the four flat slabs to the east of the corridor at the back of the two surviving apses. It seems that this represents that paving of another corridor, and if one had to take the geometric plan of the temple consisting of four apses, then one will conclude that this was the entrance to the temple.
If the temple entrance was from the east, then it must have been facing up hill, which would certainly make it unique when compared with other megalithic sites in the Maltese Islands. The second pair of apses are missing and therefore it is not possible to compare them for their size with the surviving pair, which might have given us an indication of this enigma. The façade of the temple is another missing feature, which would have definitely helped us to determine the orientation of the temple. Evans concludes that in view of all this he believes that the entrance faced west.
The size of the original Tal-Qadi temple is also another mystery, and so is the paving in the east. It might have been part of a corridor leading to some eastward extension, or even to another building. Evans remarked that its orientation appears to be slightly different from that of the two surviving apses and the corridor on the eastern side of these.
The astonishing photograph below shows the alignment of the Tal-Qadi temple with full moon. Evidence such as this dispels any notion that the temples exhibit only solar alignments
Further reading
Mnajdra Prehistoric Temple by Paul I. Micallef, Union Print Co, Ltd, 1990 (reprinted 1992).