According to his letter The names of the Maltese Islands (TMID, 20 June), Dr Mario Costa does not believe in the flood. I think he is partly right, because the two schools of thought of those who do believe in the flood have some strange ideas. In a book more than an inch thick discussing the flood, one group believes the flood was “universal” (over the entire world) and covered all mountains. Then where did all the water go? The other group believes that the flood happened only in the valley of Mesopotamia (Iraq). If so, why all the fuss to build an ark?

But the flood actually happened, according to the book of Genesis in the Bible. “Broken were all the fountains of the great deep.” And while the atheistic archaeologists admit that “the great deep” is the ocean, they do not accept it and give no other alternative.

But several archaeological facts prove that the flood did actually take place. The basin of the Mediterranean was empty, apart from a few fresh water lakes. The gap of Gibraltar was closed by a range of mountains. The Sierra Nevada of southern Spain was some 8,000 feet high and the chain continued in the north of Morocco in Er Rif, about 7,000 feet high. The Atlantic Ocean was some 6,000 feet higher than the Mediterranean depression.

Streams leaked through this ridge as explained in “the fountains of the great deep”.

Imagine the effect when that great rift valley that came up to Malta was flooded. The great flood destroyed all of Europe with the exc exception of Scandinavia, the British Isles and the northern part of the Cantabrian range of mountains in the north of Spain, where the Basque people still have a different language. All the evidence shows that the age of the flood was 3,000 BC, the end of prehistory and the beginning of history with the Phoenicians.

This huge wave had a disastrous effect wherever it passed. Malta just happened to be in the way of the onrush of water. The western walls of all the megalithic stone buildings in Malta were thrown towards the east. A block of stone three-and-a-half metres square was knocked over and moved 10 metres away on the sheltered side of Hagar Qim.

But certain archaeologists do not want to show what the flood did to the huge stone buildings of Malta, where a metre of its silt was discovered at the site of the Tarxien temples by Sir Temi Zammit and my father, Carmel. The western wall of the Tarxien temples was rebuilt with

rubble.

When it settled, this sea wave left a silt sediment three metres deep in Iraq (Mesopotamia) and two metres deep in the south of France, apart from the one in Malta, already referred to.

Now it is said by official archaeologists who do not believe in the flood that “a huge wave of water came from over the west of Europe, over Romania into the Black Sea”. They have seen the result. But what reason do they give for this? “That huge wave of water came from the melting of the ice of the Ice Age.” But whoever saw or heard of a wave of water caused by melting snow? Snow is melting all the time in the world but nowhere are any waves formed by this melting.

But the Megalithic temples of Malta are never mentioned in connection with the flood. Neither is the plaster that was used, which liquified under water, dried again, solidified and petrified into stone. It was not even mentioned by Hancock, who photographed it but did not show it in his programme in the UK. He showed a lot of

computer-created scenes but not the facts of Hagar Qim.

Now I would like to ask Dr Costa these questions. “Has he any idea why the Caspian Sea and the Sea of Aral are salty, while Lake Baykal is fresh water? Can he say why the Dead Sea is so salty or why, after rain, nothing ever grows in the depression at Qattara, between Egypt and Libya, that is filled with desert sand, while everything around it becomes green?

Why are the lakes, called “shots”, (“shat” in Semitic languages means “shore”, as of a sea) that have no outlet to the sea, salty? Because they are the remnants of the sea waters of the flood.

This is a short account of what I wrote in detail in my book Malta’s Pre Diluvian Culture etc, which has gone around the world, but is now out of print.

If one wishes to learn, one has to read reasonable truths and not a pack of unreasonable lies. One has to learn to reason out things before believing them.

Phoenician Semitic names were created a thousand years before Latin or Greek. “Ghawdex” is a corruption of the corrupted Latin “Gawdisium”.

Joseph S. Ellul

Zurrieq