ROUGH STONE MONUMENTS 



finest of the tombs, known as the Sese Grande, 

 elliptical in form (Fig. 20), has a major diameter 

 of more than 60 feet, and rises in ridges, being 

 domed at the top. It contains not one chamber, 

 but twelve, each of which has a separate entrance 

 from the outside of the sese. To judge by the 

 remains found in the sesi they belong entirely to 

 the neolithic period. 



The island of Malta as seen to-day is an almost 

 treeless, though not unfertile, stretch of rock, 

 with a harbour on the north coast which must 

 always make the place a necessary possession to 

 the first sea power of Europe. Much of its soil 

 is of comparatively modern creation, and four 

 thousand years ago the island may well have had a 

 forbidding aspect. This is perhaps the reason 

 why the first great inroads of neolithic man into 

 the Mediterranean left it quite untouched, al- 

 though it lay directly in the path of tribes immi- 

 grating into Europe from Africa. The earliest 

 neolithic remains of Italy, Crete, and the ^Egean 

 seem to have no parallel in Malta, and the first 

 inhabitants of whom we find traces in the island 

 were builders of megalithic monuments. Small 

 as Malta is it contains some of the grandest and 

 most important structures of this kind ever erected. 

 The two greatest of these, the so-called " Phoeni- 

 cian temples " of Hagiar Kim and Mnaidra, were 

 constructed on opposite sides of one of the southern 



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