In darkest Mid-Winter

Newgrange

If there is one place you should see above all others when in Ireland it is the amazing place called Newgrange, a UNESCO World Heritage site which is older than the pyramids of Egypt. This is a truly special and unique place on the Island of Ireland, no more special than yesterday, 21st December, the Winter Solstice, the shortest and darkest day of the year. To ancient cultures this represented the turning of the year, the point after which the days lengthened and hope could be sustained of the rebirth of the land in spring and the fertility of summer and the bounty of the harvest to come. The Celts celebrated this as Meán Geimhridh - Mid-Winter. This special place is North West of Dublin and surrounded on three sides by the River Boyne and is known in Gaelic as Brú na Bóinne – the Bridge of the Boyne. Standing here at the tumulus of Newgrange you are surrounded by remnants of a time when ancient advanced races like the Tuatha de Danaan or the Formorians built masterpieces like Newgrange in the plains of Royal Meath, whilst the Celts were still only a tinkle in someone’s eye in central Europe.


Brú na Bóinne – the Bridge of the Boyne

Here you are surrounded by the evidence of pre-history for there is not just the massive tumulus of Newgrange but on the hills across cleft within the incised meander of the River Boyne at Knowth and Dowth there are only slightly smaller structures and over 40 other passage graves as well as stone and timber ceremonial circles (Henges) and two ceremonial ponds as an enduring and mysterious remnant of the pre-Celtic Neolithic people who lived here.



The passage and chamber of Newgrange (Pre-Celtic or possibly Proto-Celtic 3,200 BC), a tomb in Ireland, are illuminated by the winter solstice sunrise. A shaft of sunlight shines through the roof box over the entrance and penetrates the passage to light up the chamber. The dramatic event lasts for 17 minutes at dawn from the 19th to the 23rd of December. Newgrange is unique because the builders aligned it with the rising sun. Just after sunrise, at 0858GMT, on the shortest day of the year, the inner chamber is designed to flood with sunlight, which enters through a 25cm (9.9ins) high "roof box" above the passage entrance.




Entrance Stone at Newgrange

The solstice phenomenon was discovered by archaeologist, Professor Michael J O'Kelly on 21 December 1967 during research on the site. "He found the roof box when uncovering the roof chamber but wondered about its purpose," says his daughter Helen Watanabe O'Kelly. Local people always said it was aligned to the sun but the measurements did not fit the summer solstice.


Professor Michael J O'Kelly



Professor O'Kelly excavated and restored Newgrange from 1962 to 1975. He discovered that the builders of Newgrange deliberately oriented the passage so that each year around midwinter, the rays of the rising sun would shine through a special aperture to illuminate the chamber. Professor O'Kelly was a respected teacher, writer and practicing archaeologist, he was Professor of Archaeology at University College Cork from 1946 until his untimely death in 1982.

In December 1967, Michael O'Kelly drove from his home in Cork to Newgrange. Before the sun came up he was at the tomb, ready to test his theory. “I was there entirely alone. Not a soul stood even on the road below. When I came into the tomb I knew there was a possibility of seeing the sunrise because the sky had been clear during the morning.” He was, however, quite unprepared for what followed. As the first rays of the sun appeared above the ridge on the far bank of the River Boyne, a bright shaft of orange light struck directly through the roofbox into the heart of the tomb. "I was literally astounded. The light began as a thin pencil and widened to a band of about 6 in. There was so much light reflected from the floor that I could walk around inside without a lamp and avoid bumping off the stones. It was so bright I could see the roof 20ft above me."

Since the discovery of the winter solstice alignment, Newgrange has been developed as a major tourist attraction with an interpretative centre and was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993. The citation says;

“The three main prehistoric sites of the Brú na Bóinne Complex, Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth, are situated on the north bank of the River Boyne 50 km north of Dublin. This is Europe's largest and most important concentration of prehistoric megalithic art. The monuments there had social, economic, religious and funerary functions.

The monuments of the Bend of the Boyne display longevity of settlement whose origins are found in Neolithic settlements. The various monuments, particularly the great passage tomb, represent important cultural, social, artistic and scientific developments over a considerable length of time. Nowhere else in the world is found the continuity of settlement and activity associated with a megalithic cemetery such as that which exists at Brú na Bóinne. The passage tomb complex represents a spectacular survival of the embodiment of a set of ideas and beliefs of outstanding historical significance unequalled in its counterparts throughout the rest of Europe.”




Aerial view and eastern passageway at Knowth

On the morning of 21 December, a group of people chosen by lottery, make their way through a dark, narrow passage and gathered in a small cross-shaped chamber at Newgrange in Co Meath, Irish Republic, to celebrate the winter solstice. Newgrange, located 40km north of Dublin and perched high above a bend of the River Boyne, is a prehistoric passage tomb, covered on the outside by a large grassy mound. At over 5,000 years old it is the older cousin of Stonehenge and it predates the pyramids by about 500 years.

It is difficult to estimate how long it would have taken to build it."They were a very sophisticated society with a sound economic base as they were able to divert a large number of people to the building of passage tombs," says archaeologist Professor George Eogan. "The ritual of the dead was very important in their lives and the site combines engineering, architectural and artistic skills."


Newgrange Winter Solstice 2010


Winter Solstice Newgrange - the light coming through the lightbox over the door into the inner chamber

Clare Tuffy, the visitor centre's manager who has worked at Newgrange since the early 1980s, keeps the guests outside for as long possible on the solstice morning. “ Even though the passage way and chamber are only 24m (78ft) long, once you enter you are cut off from the outside world and lose a sense of time passing. When the sun clears the horizon you can hear a big cheer from those gathered outside. We have to wait four minutes after sunrise to experience the light entering the chamber because the earth's angle has changed since it was constructed 5,000 years ago. The light remains in the chamber for 17 minutes before retreating."

People are motivated to come by the symbolism of the light and dark and the turning of the year. Some have made it a tradition and come year after year. Druids also assemble outside, chanting and singing.


Passageway Dowth

Nearby is Knowth which was built around 3300BC and has two passages facing towards the east and west. The carved stones contain a quarter of Western European Neolithic art. An extensive excavation has revealed a wealth of information about the site. There are two passages at Dowth, which is about the same age as Newgrange and Knowth. One passage is aligned on Winter Solstice sunset, and the other probably aligned on the Moon. Dowth was excavated, albeit very badly, in the 1840s. A few miles away is the Hill of Tara was the ancient seat of the High Kings of Ireland. There are a multitude of remains on the hill, including a passage mound, the Mound of the Hostages, which dates to between 2500-3000BC, and other earthworks and structures. Tara is aligned with the Hill of Slane, and Millmount in Drogheda. Slane is where St. Patrick lit the Paschal Fire in 433 AD before convincing Laoighre, High King of Ireland to allow him to preach Christianity to his people.


Hill of Tara - seat of The High Kings of Ireland

So the people here had a Druidic culture which predated the Celts and of which we know surprisingly little. They came over on the land-bridge from Scotland and migrated down the coastline. Ireland then was covered by a dense forest which harboured Bears and Giant Elk which they only gradually penetrated along the rivers. They came to the wide mouth of the Boyne and when they came to this naturally defensive and fertile area protected on three sides by a wide river they settled, farmed, traded, fished and developed their belief systems in a highly organised society which had advanced rituals and beliefs. Here they built large passage graves, the stones for Newgrange are not local but came from the Cooley Peninsular and the Wicklow mountains 30 and 70 miles away respectively, denoting a highly organised society which could devote resources to the funerary rites of its leaders. They are also sophisticated structures with circular ring of massive band stones to contain the weight of the structure and overlapping capstones to keep the interior dry.

Here also developed the myths which the Celts would take over and make their own, just as the Greeks took the Hittite Myths (Mythos – oral history) made them their own and embellished them. The saga of Táin Bó Cúailnge – The Cattle Raid of Cooley, pitting the warriors of Ulster, including Cuchulainn, against the warriors of Connacht. Cattle were their measure of wealth; indeed we get the English word “Chattel” meaning a movable asset from cattle. We get the tale of the Salmon of Wisdom and Fionn mac Cumhaill from the rich bounty of the river.


Reconstructed Hill Fort @ Craggaunowen, Co. Clare

When the Iron-Age Celts came they found (and probably integrated with) a Bronze-Age people who were smaller and stockily built. In Gaelic they referred to them as small bodied “Luchrupán” which gives us the word leprechaun and the “crock of gold” stems from the passage graves filled with grave goods as does the folklore of leprechauns living underground. Here they lived, loved, farmed, fished and left behind numerous monuments but of these people, The Tuatha de Dannan, sometimes mis-translated as the “People of Magic” we know very little. They and the Celts left behind thousands of Ring Forts, circular stockades surrounded by moats which contained their dwellings and provided protection for their families and livestock. Often referred to as fairy forts they were never built on by subsequent inhabitants but were sometimes used as graveyards and they litter the landscape of Ireland to this day. They build similar protective enclosures “Crannógs” in the middle of lakes and waterways.


Reconstruction of a Crannóg

And here on this hill in Brú na Bóinne they gathered on each Winter Solstice in front of their huge structure of Newgrange aligned with the Sun at its lowest point in Winter to wait for its magical rays to penetrate into the chamber at the centre of this huge funerary structure which contained the remains of their Chieftains. And as the Sun’s rays revived and resurrected the Earth they believed that it would resurrect those interred in this huge tomb.

An ancient people in an ancient land.


Hill of Slane

A local historical site;

http://www.knowth.com/newgrange.html

Read about the Hill of Tara

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/12/hill-of-tara.html

The second most important Neolithic remains and the oldest stone structure in Europe are on the Island of Malta

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/02/neolithic-malta.html

For more about Mid-Winter Festivals see "Bona Saturnalia"

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/12/bona-saturnalia.html


See also; Newgrange - Archaeology, Art and Legend by Michael J. O'Kelly and Claire O'Kelly (Available on Amazon)



Brú na Bóinne Visitors Center

Address: Donore, Co. Meath.
Telephone No: +353 41 988 0300.
Fax No: +353 41 982 3071.

Email: brunaboinne@opw.ie

http://www.heritageireland.ie/en/MidlandsEastCoast/BrunaBoinneVisitorCentreNewgrangeandKnowth



On the 21st December each year a beam of sunlight shines up the passageway to light the central chamber of Newgrange. These are images taken during several visits at this time to the music "Newgrange" by Clannad

Neolithic Malta

Mnajdra temple complex





Malta is associated in the public mind with many images, holiday beaches, The Knights of St. John, The Grand Harbour of Valletta, grandiose churches but few are aware that it has some of the earliest and most developed Neolithic sites extant including at Gigantija on the island of Gozo the world’s oldest stone building. The list of Malta’s heritage sites is dominated by the Islands’ prehistoric megalithic temples and underground chambers. This small island of 243 square kilometers has a far greater importance in European prehistory due to this extraordinary collection of megalithic temples.



It is on Malta and Gozo you find the oldest man-made free-standing constructions on Earth. Borg in-Nadur, Xrobb l-Ghagin, Tas-Silg, Tarxien, Kordin, Hal-Saflieni Hypogeum, Hagar Qim, Mnajdra, Ta' Hagrat, Skorba, Tal-Qadi, Bugibba, Ggantija.




Gigantija



Situated 90 kilometers south of Sicily and 370 kilometers east of the Tunisian coast, the island of Malta appears to have been first settled during the early Neolithic period by a wave of immigrants from the island of Sicily. Several thousand years before the arrival of the Phoenicians, the Maltese Islands were the home to a remarkable culture. These people acquired the skills, and had the strength of spiritual devotion, to mobilise men and resources to build megalithic structures and hew out living rock into burial chambers. This culture was to vanish from the Islands whether through famine, fire, natural disaster or routed by invasion no one knows. The remains seen today are both fascinating and perplexing for there are no definite answers to how and why they were built or for what they were used.



Malta’s temples and the Hypogeum are designated UNESCO World Heritage sites.

The ruins which remain are the bare skeletons of once magnificent structures, mostly roofed over, paved, furnished with doors and curtains, and beautifully decorated with sculptures and paintings. Some archaeologists assume that the period in which the early Maltese progressed from their first rock-cut common graves to their last massive temple complexes was between 3800 and 2400 BC. Around 2300 BC this extraordinary megalithic culture went into rapid decline. A major cause seems to have been the extreme deforestation and soil loss that accompanied the increase in population and the attendant clearing of land for agriculture. Other causes may have been famine, social disruption in response to an oppressive priesthood, and the arrival of foreign invaders. Following the decline of the temple culture, Malta may well have been deserted until the arrival of Bronze Age peoples around 2000 BC.





Statues - National Archaeological Museum






Sleeping Lady

On the islands of Malta and nearby Gozo, the remains of 50 temples have been found, with 23 in various states of preservation. Nearly all of the Maltese temples are constructed in the same basic design: a central corridor leading through two or more kidney-shaped (ellipsoidal) chambers to reach a small alter apse at the far end. The earliest interiors were plastered and painted with red ochre. Later interiors were decorated with intricately carved spirals on steps and altars, friezes of farm animals, fish and snakes, and a simple pattern of pitted dots. Still evident are wall sockets for wooden barriers or curtains and niches for ritual activities. Some of the relief decoration is of such delicate work that it is difficult to understand how it could have been carried out using only stone tools. Artifacts and furnishings (now removed from the temples and placed in museums) indicate ancestor worship, oracular and fertility goddess cults. The temples seem to have been used only for ritual activity and not as cemeteries, for no burials have been found. Sacrificial flint knives are among the artifacts discovered in the temples but no human bones, indicating that sacrifices were solely of animals and not humans.

A good place to start the exploration of Neolithic Malta is the National Museum of Archaeology in the Auberge de Provence in Valletta. This is one of the “inns” or Auberge of the eight Langue or tongues of the Knights of St John which are represented on the eight pointed Maltese Cross.





Auberge de Provence, Valletta, now National Museum of Archaeology







Ceiling - National Museum of Archaeology





National Museum of Archaeology.
The National Museum of Archaeology displays an exceptional array of artifacts from Malta’s unique prehistoric periods starting with the first arrival of man in the Ghar Dalam phase (5200 BC) and running up to the Tarxien phase (2500 BC). The collection is housed in the Auberge de Provence, one of the first and most important buildings to be erected in Malta’s baroque capital city, Valletta, after the Great Siege in the late 16th century. The main hall is devoted to temple carvings, in particular the giant statue and altar blocks of Tarxien Temples. The collection continues with representations of animals, temple models, and the remarkable human figures. Of particular note are the exquisite figures of the ‘Sleeping Lady’ from the Hypogeum, and the ‘Venus’ of Hagar Qim.

‘Mother Goddess' from Tarxien

Heading from Valletta to the “three cities” on the far side of the Grand Harbour just outside the Cottonera Line, the defensive bastion encircling the cities you come to the suburb of Paola where a short distance apart you find the Tarxien Temples and the Hypogeum at Hal Saflieni.

Tarxien.


The Tarxien site (pronounced "tar-sheen"), discovered by a farmer in 1915 comprises three temples, one of which contains a famous statue of the lower body of a standing figure. Sometimes interpreted as a goddess statue by feminist writers (there is really no way of knowing this as the gender is indeterminate), it is one of the world's earliest known and most powerful representations of a deity.

This site, dating from 3600 to 2500 BC, is the most complex of all temple sites in Malta and consists of four megalithic structures. The temples are renowned for the detail of their carvings, which include domestic animals carved in relief, altars, and screens decorated with spiral designs and other patterns. Of particular note is a chamber set into the thickness of the wall between the South and Central temples, which is famous for its relief of two bulls and a sow.











The site seems to have been used extensively for rituals, which probably involved animal sacrifice. Tarxien is also of great interest because it offers an insight into how the temples were constructed: stone rollers left outside the south temple were probably used for transporting the megaliths. Remains of cremation have also been found at the centre of the South temple at Tarxien, which indicates that the site was reused as a Bronze Age cremation cemetery.


Hypogeum at Hal Saflieni.
Another important temple, the Hypogeum at Hal Saflieni, departs from the norm of Maltese temples. Located close to the Tarxien temple complex in the modern suburb of Paola, it was discovered by chance in 1902 during the digging of a well. The Hypogeum is a multi-storey underground labyrinth (25 x 35 meters) consisting of chambers, halls, corridors and stairs, which over the centuries were extended deeper and deeper in to the soft limestone. Constructed (according to the orthodox chronology) between 4000 and 5000 years ago, the Hypogeum was both a sanctuary and a cemetery, and the bones of some 7000 humans have been found.





Plan of Hypogeum at Hal Saflieni



The most impressive chamber, commonly called "the holy of holies" has pillars and lintels that are architecturally remarkable. With its walls coated in red paint, it has been suggested that the chamber was used for animal sacrifices. Another chamber, the so-called Oracular room, has a square niche cut into the wall that may have been used so that a priest's voice could echo around the temple. A mysterious quality of this particular room is that a man's voice will powerfully reverberate around the chamber while a woman's voice is all but absorbed by the ancient stones.







Heading to the south coast of the island on a cliff top you come to the sites of Hagar Qim and Mnajdra.

Hagar Qim.


The massive ruins of Hagar Qim (pronounced "agar-eem") and Mnajdra (pronounced "eem-na-eed-rah") stand on a rocky plateau on the southwest coast of Malta, overlooking the sea and facing the uninhabited islet of Filfla, 4.8 kilometers away. This plateau is composed of two types of limestone; the lower, harder stone (gray coralline limestone) out of which Mnajdra is constructed, and the upper, softer stone (pale globigerina limestone) from which Hagar Qim is built.





Shrine altar - Hagar Qim






Hagar Qim






Model of Hagar Qim



The name Hagar Qim means 'standing stones' and previous to the excavations of these ruins all that could be seen was a mound of earth from which only the tops of the tallest stones protruded. Hagar Qim, possibly constructed in several phases between 3500 BC and 2900 BC, is built with some of the largest stones of any temple on Malta; one massive stone is 7 meters by 3 meters (22 ft by 10 ft) and weighs approximately 20 tons. The temple's soft globigerina limestone walls have weathered badly over the millennia and later temple builders used the harder coralline limestone such as is found at Mnajdra complex just down the hill.

Mnajdra Temple.


The Mnajdra temple complex is located about 500 meters to the west of Hagar Qim, closer to the edge of the promontory facing the sea. Mnajdra consists of two buildings, a main temple with two ellipsoidal chambers and a smaller temple with one chamber. Among their other possible uses, the temples of Mnajdra fulfilled astronomical observation and calendrical functions. The main entrance faces east, and during the spring and autumn equinoxes the first rays of light fall on a stone slab on the rear wall of the second chamber. During the winter and summer solstices, the first rays of the sun illuminate the corners of two stone pillars in the passageway connecting the main chambers. In the case of Mnajdra, the alignment today is good, but not quite perfect

Heading now across to the neighbouring island of Gozo we find many other Neolithic remains including the remarkable temple which is the oldest standing stone monument in the world named after the Maltese word for “gigantic”.

Gigantija.


The largest and best preserved of all the Maltese temples is on Gozo (a 20-minute ferry ride from Malta). Constructed (according to the assumptions of conventional archaeology) between 3600 and 3000 BC, the temple of Gigantija covers 1000 square meters and its astonishing rear wall still rises 6 meters and contains megaliths weighing in at 40-50 tons. According to local legends, the massive blocks of Gigantija (the word means gigantic) were carved in the south of Gozo by a female giant.

Gigantija









How do we explain the fact that the oldest free-standing stone monuments in the world, which by virtue of there size and sophistication declare themselves to have been built by a people who had already accumulated long experience in the science of megalithic construction, appear on the archaeological scene on a group of very small islands - the Maltese archipelago - that had not even been inhabited by human beings until 1600 years ago? Wouldn't you expect a “civilization history” to show up in the Maltese archaeological record documenting ever-more sophisticated construction techniques - and indeed wouldn't you also expect an extensive territory capable of supporting a reasonably sized population (rather than tiny barren islands) to surround and nourish the greatest architectural leap forward of antiquity?









Neolithic carvings





Paleoanthropologists excavating in the caves of Ghar Hasan and Ghar Dalam on Malta found evidence of Neanderthal humans along with the skeletal remains of animals (European deer, bear, wolf and fox) known to be extinct long before the end of the Paleolithic era. While the Neanderthal could conceivably have made the sea voyage from mainland Europe to Malta during early Paleolithic times (though there is absolutely no evidence of such sea migrations anywhere in the Neanderthal record), the animals could not have made such a sea journey and would therefore had to have somehow walked to the region of Malta. But isn't Malta an island remotely located in the midst of a vast sea?

Malta has not always been an island and this fact we learn from oceanographers and the new science of inundation mapping. Around 17,000 years ago, at the time of the Last Ice Age, when the level of the world's oceans was more than 120 meters lower than it is today, the islands of the Maltese archipelago were the mountain tops of one landmass joined by land-bridge to Sicily (90 kilometers to the north), which itself was joined to the southern end of what is today the Italian mainland. Therefore, until 16,400 years ago, Paleolithic humans and the animals they hunted could simply have walked from Europe all the way to Malta. These people would have lived, hunted (and perhaps farmed) mostly in the lowland areas and (like so many other cultures of antiquity) might have constructed some of their temples upon the peaks of sacred mountains. Given the many thousands of years of time during which Malta was connected by land to mainland Europe and the likelihood of information exchange from other cultural regions of prehistoric Europe, it is eminently possible that the extraordinary architectural style of the Maltese temples could have been developed.


Then the ice caps began to melt and the level of the oceans slowly rose, relentlessly inundating coastal areas and the land-bridges between higher altitude regions. By 14,600 years ago, the land-bridge to Sicily had disappeared beneath the sea and by 10,600 years ago the waters had risen so high that only the peaks of Malta were above the seas, forming the islands we have today of Malta, Gozo and Comino. In the process of this inundation the social centers in the lowland regions would have been lost beneath the waters and the people would have retreated to the higher altitudes of the Maltese peaks or would have migrated northward to Italy and the mainland of the European landmass. The Maltese archipelago would henceforth be completely isolated from European cultural influences and would therefore display unique developmental characteristics, which is exactly the case found in the archaeological record.

Perhaps the great temples of Malta were not actually constructed during Neolithic times but are in fact artifacts of a much older Paleolithic civilization (remember, there is no radio-carbon or other archaeological dating to substantiate the current assumption of a Neolithic origin of the Maltese temples). Perhaps the elegant astronomical alignments of the temples and the presence of advanced mathematics in their construction indicate that the island of Malta was once part of a pan-regional (or global) sacred geography, itself formulated by a long lost civilization of high scientific and spiritual achievement. To determine the answers to these questions it will be necessary to conduct much more extensive archaeological excavations on Malta and, equally important, at the many underwater archaeological sites known to exist in the waters surrounding the islands. Whatever their ultimate origin however, the Maltese temples are places of power not to be missed by any serious pilgrim and earth mysteries aficionado and a source of curious fascination to visitors.





"Venus" of Malta





See also;



http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/02/gozo.html









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