The fifty-tonne blocks
Raised without metal, wheel or animal.
FritzPhotography — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Dietrich Michael Weidmann — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Dietrich Michael Weidmann — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Dietrich Michael Weidmann — CC BY-SA 3.0
Ġgantija is older (3600 BC) with higher, more complete walls; Ħaġar Qim is more famous, easier to reach and more beautifully sited on its cliff. Anyone visiting Gozo should not miss Ġgantija; anyone staying on the main island is well served by Ħaġar Qim.
Nobody knows for certain: after a thousand years of building, everything stopped around 2500 BC and the population disappeared, with hypotheses ranging from soil exhaustion to drought to epidemic — then a new Bronze Age wave arrived knowing nothing of the temple builders.
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The oldest free-standing structure made by human hands on Earth: the two Ġgantija temples on Gozo were raised around 3600 BC — a thousand years before the pyramids of Giza and more than that before Stonehenge — and they still stand, their original walls six metres high. Their Maltese name means "the giantess's tower": islanders believed for centuries that a giantess built them, because some of their limestone blocks weigh fifty tonnes and were moved and raised without metal, wheel or draught animal — the archaeological explanation being stone spheres used as rollers, some of which are displayed on site. The two temples share one boundary wall with a concave facade and a forecourt, and inside are successive oval chambers with altars, basins and spiral carvings. The visitor centre at the entrance explains the whole Maltese temple civilisation and how it vanished abruptly around 2500 BC, and the ticket includes the neighbouring eighteenth-century Ta' Kola windmill.
Raised without metal, wheel or animal.
A forecourt for rites nobody survives to explain.
The engineering answer, displayed on site.
Triq John Otto Bayer, Xagħra