I was very pleased and interested to read the interview entitled Safeguarding Malta’s Heritage (TMID 22 September). But the thing that most happily surprised me was the mentioning of an exhibition on Prof. Luigi Maria Ugolini, a very renowned Italian archaeologist.

Prof. Ugolini was in Malta in the 1930’s studying Malta’s archaeology. When he was at Hagar Qim he found himself in great difficulty in understanding certain particulars in Malta.

Saying he was greatly confused he went to my father, the caretaker, who looked more like a farmer than some professor, and confided to him his difficulties. In part English and part Italian they understood each other.

My father, who had been the consultant with Sir Temi Zammit, knew a lot about archaeology. As my father explained to him, Ugolini noticed that this farmer-looking man was a real archaeologist. To thank my father, Ugolini did not give him any money, but gave him something much more precious than money.

Prof. Ugolini took my father inside the temple and explained to him all the systems of construction ideas – one was that there were no oracles in the stone-age as women were not even allowed to enter the temple but had a small chapel just outside where they could hear the services through an acoustic opening which we have termed an “oracle hole”. This outside chapel is found both at Hagar Qim and at Tarxien temples. Of course, the one at Tarxien is much more developed and the transmission opening is much different.

Prof. Ugolini also explained the building system the stone-age people used at Hagar Qim and how it was roofed.

On these very reasonable ideas upon which I could continue to build, I wrote my book Malta’s Prediluvian Culture At The Stone Age Temples, which, Malta’s archaeological authorities discarded as they were under the control of English archaeologists who labelled Prof. Ugolini as “politically- biased”, like the harlot, they gave him of what they got.

It was the English archaeology with Evan’s wrong ideas of the “Goddess of Fertility” for the Hagar Qim statuettes that are “all male” as they possess no female busts which everyone can notice while tourists laugh at us, some of them openly.

Trump copied from my book saying that the Neolithic people built their temples in the form of their squatting god as we Christians build our churches in the form of a cross on which our God was crucified. Formerly he used to say “In the form of the Wild Clover Trefoil.” Lately he was ashamed to write just Goddess but he put it within inverted commas. After all the “Goddess of Fertility” was actually attributed to Mother Earth.

Evans came to Malta to destroy Malta’s archaeology, ridicule Sir Temi on Tarxien Temples (he ridiculed himself instead), stole the special human skull from Hagar Qim and also micro-tools (all from the museum when he was supposedly organising it, officially). Evans also claimed that stone-age pot-shards he unearthed at Hagar Qim high chapel, when asked by my father, Carmel, who used to help Sir Temi in his excavations, “How old are those pot-shards?”, Evans answered: “1500BC?”. My father told him, “So they belong to the Phoenicians.” Evans did not say one single word but he put it down in his books and swallowed by Malta’s archaeologists.

The only British archaeologist who spoke sincerely about Malta’s temples was Prof. Vere Gordon Child who was really an Australian.

Until Malta’s archaeology was commandeered by the English, Prof. Ugolini was never mentioned.

When Prof. Ugolini was in Malta in the thirties (1930’s) there cropped up the Mussolini – Abyssinia war and so Ugolini was expelled from Malta. But it was only he, Ugolini, who said sincere things about Malta’s archaeology. The English ideas are all biased to depreciate Malta’s great Archaeology.

Our guides are still imbued with wrong ideas such as those of the oracles and the goddesses of Hagar Qim just because they have fat arms and tight muscles, and wear a skirt like the Scotts and Roman soldiers and all those before 500 years ago.

Sir Temi wrote under one of the statues that they are “males”. Why did the English ridicule the Maltese archaeologists by making them call the statuettes as “female goddesses?” When none of them show a female bust?

Now Malta is free of the English commandeering and so, The Malta Heritage, can revamp the real, true archaeology of Malta – the only thing Malta has that no other country possesses.

If those “concentration camp” ropes are removed from around Hagar Qim so that people could visit the whole of the temple and explained as in my book, people will be mesmerised and tell others to come and see the thing for themselves. Some of the plaques at Hagar Qim are not factual.

Joseph S. Ellul

Zurrieq