Rising abruptly at the edge of a barren plateau, the tower's scarred and jagged rock walls seem immensely thick and immensely old. They are in fact immensely old, part of a cluster of buildings spread over a ten-mile radius that, according to the latest scientific calculations, are the oldest freestanding stone monuments on the face of the earth. Just short of 6,000 years old, they antedate anything we think of as an advanced civilization.

More than 30 similar structures hae been found on Malta and Gozo, and others are surely buried under villages and city streets. At least four--the Giant's Tower on Gozo, Hagar Qim (pronounced HAD-jar IM), Tarxien (TAR-shen) and Mnajdra (NY-dra) on the main island of Malta--are of a size that would be considered impressive anywhere on earth. Some of the stones of which they are built weigh more than 20 tons.

The trouble with the archaeological record is that it contains only imperishable materials, like stone. What is clear is that the Maltese went on building temples, making their offerings to the fat ladies and piling the bones of their dead neatly in chapels, until, suddenly, they stopped. No one knows why. It was about 2500 B.C. The arcaeological record is broken off sharply.

Smithsonian, September 1996, pp 64, 70.