#37 Songs in the Key of V, part 3
#37 Songs in the Key of V, part 3
Part the first of a Malta deep dive
Though it focused on the theme of Pentecost in Pynchon’s novel, part 2 of Songs in the Key of V also saw us dip our toes into the glittering waters of Maltese lore and history. This part 3 is the beginning of a deep dive into that subject, one that’ll eventually span multiple parts. Such is the richness of Malta’s island story. Along the way we’ll consider any links with V. (in both senses) that suggest themselves.
i
Occupying a highly strategic location in the centre of the Mediterranean, the Malta archipelago is poor in natural resources, boasting only ubiquitous limestone rock and a number of natural deepwater harbours. These few facts are the islands’ cardinal realities, the ones that have largely determined their history. Malta was home to Neolithic temple builders, served as a way station for Phoenician traders and a naval base for their compatriots, the Carthaginians. It hosted a recuperating Saint Paul after he was shipwrecked on Maltese rocks in a storm. The islands were an outpost of the medieval Arabs, whose legacy—according to quite recent research—appears to be the native language of the islands, Malti. Malta served as a Christian fortress in the centuries-long struggle with the Ottomans, famously resisting a massive besieging Turkish force in 1565. And, as Pynchon’s debut novel powerfully reminds us, the island country endured massive aerial bombardment in the 1940s, as the Axis powers sought to conquer it to further their aims in the Mediterranean.
As can be inferred from that minimal potted history, limestone has made large-scale construction on the islands possible. There are two types of such rock found on Malta. The first is coralline limestone, which is hard and multicoloured, varying in hue from almost white to grey to red. Globigerina limestone, a soft, yellow variety, is the second type. In both cases, the rock was formed by a process that recalls one of V.'s key themes, the animate transforming into the inanimate. As J Kerry Grant observes, the word “inanimate” occurs almost sixty times in the novel. Profane has a tendency to find the inanimate unsettling—on the night ferry to Norfolk, for instance, and also when he catches Rachel sweet-talking her beloved MG. Pynchon explores his animate / inanimate theme with other characters too. Consider how physically transformed V. is by the time of her incarnation as the Bad Priest—not only has (s)he embraced the inanimate, (s)he counsels the male children of embattled Malta to do so as well:
The boys he told to find strength in - and be like - the rock of their island. He returned, curiously like the Generation of '37, often to the rock: preaching that the object of male existence was to be like a crystal: beautiful and soulless.
V. can be considered an avatar for a world-historical process that is described elsewhere as ”decadence… a falling-away from what is human.” These are the words of the impresario Itague, in chapter 14. He continues:
…the further we fall the less human we become. Because we are less human, we foist off the humanity we have lost on inanimate objects and abstract theories.
As we’ll see, in V. as in other stories and novels, Pynchon appears to be very much preoccupied with a modern civilisation in the grip of decadence and entropy.
Let’s return to the subject of limestone formation on Malta—here we see the once-animate being transformed in a much slower (and less morally fraught) way. Over aons, the deposition and consolidation of coral skeletons produced hard coralline limestone. Malta’s softer limestone takes its name from Globigerina, a genus of small mollusks. The remains of their calcareous shells, along with the skeletons of some vertebrates, formed this rock.
Geologically speaking, the islands of Malta can be pictured as a layer cake. The hard top and bottom layers are coralline limestone. They surround a soft middle layer—a filling—of globigerina.
ii
The Temple Builders
With its tendency to fracture both horizontally and vertically into natural slabs, coralline limestone was popular with Malta's earliest inhabitants. They used it to build the great megalithic temple complex known to archeologists as Gigantija, which is located on Gozo. This second largest island of the Malta archipelego has an interesting connection to Greek mythology. Many hold Gozo to be Ogygia, the island where Calypso held Odysseus in unusually sensual captivity for seven years.
Construction of Gigantija began in approximately 3600 BC and continued—without the interference of any nymphs, as far as we know—for well over 1000 years. That places Gigantija entirely within the Neolithic period when, needless to say, metal tools were still unknown. This complex is the oldest of Malta’s several temple sites. Indeed, the Gigantija temples are the second oldest free-standing structures in the world after those of Göbekli Tepe in present-day Turkey. Like the other complexes on Malta, Gigantija faces southeast and, like Stonehenge, is aligned with the equinox sunrise. Plentiful animal remains indicate sacrifices were made in the temples; there is no evidence of human sacrifice.
Slightly younger than Gigantija is Ħaġar Qim, among the most famous of Malta’s temple sites. This complex is of a quite different design to Gigantija and is located on the main island’s southern edge. Ħaġar Qim was built from the globigerina limestone found at surface level in that part of Malta and, as such, has suffered from severe weathering and surface flaking over the millennia. Since 2009 a high-tech tent has protected the site. In V. we find Ħaġar Qim mentioned twice, though Pynchon uses an alternate spelling. Both occurrences are in chapter 11, Fausto’s confessions. In the first passage Fausto laments a lack of societal progress. He speaks caustically of Malti:
Have it, or today's Builders, advanced at all since the half-men who built the sanctuaries of Hagiar Kim? We talk as animals might.
In the second Pynchon, through Fasto, once again riffs bleakly on entropy:
…the sun grows colder, the Hagiar Kim ruins progress towards dust, as do we, as does my little Hillman Minx which was sent to a garage for old age in 1939 and is now disintegrating quietly under tons of garage-rubble.
His use of the “Hagiar Kim” spelling suggests Pynchon was familiar with the work of eminent Maltese archeologist Sir Thermosticles "Temi" Zammit (1864 - 1935). Zammit used precisely that rendering in his Malta: The Islands and their History. If Pynchon did read that book, he no doubt took note of an observation of the archeologist’s concerning the islands’ so-called “cart tracks”. These are found on many of the barren rock surfaces of Malta and Gozo, though consensus opinion holds that they aren’t real cart tracks. Though typically running parallel, in places they are, Zammit notes, “shaped like the letter V, tapering to a width of 5 ½ inches”. Even more curiously, carbon dating places the tracks at 2500 BC, later than most of the islands’ temple construction. One theory is that the tracks were used for sledges, and that the cargo being moved about was topsoil. Taking this vital resource from low-lying areas to the hills, in order to create terraces there, would’ve increased the amount of tillable land. While plausible, this theory doesn’t explain why some of the tracks taper.
The Temple Builders do not seem to have possessed any weapons—no doubt their isolation on the Maltese islands meant they could see no need for them. Archeologist John D. Evans:
Lack of weapons for the chase implies lack of weapons for war, and certainly insofar as we can judge from the evidence, no more peaceable society seems ever to have existed...
But the pacific, pious life of the Temple Builders was not to last. 2000 BC marks the abrupt end of their culture. It’s very likely that around then invaders arrived—the evidence suggests from the southernmost end of Italy’s heel. These people used advanced weapons and tools of copper and bronze. If the Temple Builders hadn’t already been wiped out by an epidemic or other disaster, they must’ve been quickly overrun. It may even be that the warlike invaders, called the Destroyers by Evans, carried out a genocide of the Temple Builders. At any rate no trace of the latter’s culture can be found from the second millennium BC onwards. Though technologically more sophisticated, the Destroyers were quite a bit cruder culturally than the people they defeated and / or replaced. Though the newcomers settled at, and made use of, the ancient temples found at the site known as Tarxien today, they don’t seem to have built their own. The Destroyers are thus more commonly known as the Tarxian Cemetery culture. Their archaeological legacy indicates their origin in the heel of Italy, and consists of burial chambers known as dolmens. Consisting of two or more vertical megaliths supporting a horizontal capstone, the dolmen is a structure found in much of Western Europe as well as in other regions around the world. The diappearance / overthrow of the Temple Builders is thus a case of a unique culture being replaced by a less original, more ubiquitous one: an early example, we might say, of globalisation.. The Destroyers are notable for introducing to Malta the practice of cremation, that funeral rite which is both a practical and symbolic rejection of natural entropy and decay.
iii
The Phoenician Era
Around 1400 BC the Destroyers were themselves replaced. The invaders, another Bronze Age people, seem to have come from Sicily. Though they were soon settled at Borg-in-Nadur, north of modern Birzebbuga, the struggle with the Tarxian Cemetery culture was apparently protracted, as evidenced by the many defensive positions constructed at this time. The eventual victory of the Borg-in-Nadur culture meant Malta’s ancient temples again fell under new ownership. However, the newcomers did not necessarily use them for worship. For instance, at a settlement in the south of the main island, near the large bay called Marsaxlokk, an old temple was used as the community’s kitchen.
This successor people lived peacefully and undisturbed on Malta for about six centuries. During this time they slowly evolved into an Iron Age culture, with influences from Sicily and mainland Italy. This was the last prehistoric civilisation on Malta. In around 800 BC the Phoenicians arrived, and the recorded history of the islands began.
The Phoenicians dominated Mediterranean trade at this time, having taken it over from the Mycenaeans when the latter collapsed around 1200 BC. Though it destroyed civilisation on Crete, in Anatolia, Egypt and elsewhere, the mysterious Late Bronze Age Collapse seems to have largely spared Byblos, Tyre, Beirut, Sidon and the other city-states of Canaan, aka Phoenicia. During this period of Phoenician ascendence, these seafaring merchants of the Levant (modern-day Lebanon) expanded westwards into the Mediterranean power vacuum, establishing new towns on Cyprus and Crete, and later on Sicily, on the Iberian peninsula and in North Africa. Malta’s natural harbours and its position on the East-West trade routes made it an attractive place for the Phoenicians to found settlements that could serve as way stations, trading posts and havens. Indeed, the colonists called the archipelago’s larger island “Maleth”, which means “refuge”. This may be the origin of the name “Malta”, though this is far from certain. Other, no less plausible theories have been advanced. For instance, some scholars have focused on the fact the Greeks knew the islands as “Melítē”, meaning “place of sweetness”—significantly, honey is known to have been produced on Malta during the period of Roman rule. What’s more, the present-day city of Mdina was called Melite in antiquity, and it was the islands’ main city in those days. Conceivably, though, both these theories are to some degree correct, with one civilisation’s name being a corruption or adaptation of the other’s.
The best source on the Phoenician presence on Malta is Diodorus of Sicily, a first-century BC writer. He described how these ambitious traders from the East developed a mutually beneficial relationship with the Maltese natives:
..the inhabitants of this island, since they received assistance in many respects through the sea-merchants, shot up quickly in their manner of living and increased in renown.
On Malta, the Phoenicians built temples to gods such as Melkart, their equivalent to Hercules. While the Canaanite religion bore passing similarity to the Greek, there was one purported difference that’s become notorious: the former likely practiced child sacrifice. Consulting the many ancient sources that attest to this, a disturbing picture emerges: to secure favours from the gods and especially in times of adversity, such as in wartime or following a natural disaster, Phoenician parents sacrificed their children. For instance, a mother and father might vow to sacrifice their next child if a ship of theirs bearing a valuable cargo reached port safely during a storm. If this kind of thing did indeed occur then it was by no means an age-old practice. It seems to have begun, and become widespread, in the first millennium BC, before that being unknown. Biblical evidence indicates the Phoenicians’ southern neighbours the Israelites may likewise have practiced child sacrifice, at least until King Josiah of Judah set about putting a stop to it in the 7th century BC. No such reform is reported among the Phoenicians, who on into the Carthagian era appear to have continued to sacrifice their children to win the gods’ favour. What the Maltese natives made of the Phoenicians’ bloodier religious practices isn’t recorded. Whatever the case, religious differences don’t seem to have affected economic cooperation between the two peoples.
In addition to their mercantile expertise and their dark religion, the Phoenicians are famous for their alphabet. One of the first alphabets, this consonant-only writing system (vowels were left implicit) was innovative for fixing the direction of writing and reading: horizontal only, and from right to left. Earlier systems had been multidirectional. Such was the success of the Phoenicians and their alphabet that the latter was disseminated all over the Mediterranean in the 1st millennium BC. From it was derived the Greek alphabet, which in turn inspired our Latin script. Interestingly for Pynchonians, the Latin letter V ultimately comes from the sixth letter of the Phoenician alphabet, waw (“hook”, W in the figure above), by way of U. Since for many centuries U and V were used interchangeably (though in line with certain rules) and modern, consonant-only V did not emerge until the 16th century, I’ll return to this topic in a later part of Songs In The Key of V. Amongst other things, that part will cover the important role the island country played in the decipherment of the Phoenician language in the 18th century.
Sources used:
Castillo, Dennis, The Maltese Cross: A Strategic History of Malta, Praeger Security International, 2006.
Rudolf, Uwe Jens, Historical Dictionary of Malta, Third Edition, Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.
Grant, J. Kerry, A Companion to V., University of Georgia Press, 2001.
Alworth, David, Pynchon’s Malta, 2012.
Wikipedia: Late Bronze Age collapse.
Kinder, Hermann and Hilgemann, Werner, The Penguin Atlas of World History Volume 1: From Prehistory to the Eve of the French Revolution, Penguin Books, 2004.
Woolmer, Mark, A Short History of the Phoenicians, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.