these have any affinity with those which Sir J. Simpson so copiously illustrated,[1] is by no means clear. In Malta they are spread evenly over the stone, and are such a decoration as might be used at the present day (woodcut No. 181). An altar was found in one of the outer chambers at Hagiar Khem, and in both the Maltese monuments, stone tables from 4 to 5 feet high (one is shown in the woodcut No. 181), the use of which is not clearly made out. They are too tall for altars, and, unless in the Balearic Islands, nothing like them is known elsewhere.
After what has been said above, it is hardly worth while to enter into the argument whether these buildings are temples or tombs. Their situation alone, in this instance, is sufficient to prove that they do not belong to the former class. Men do not drop three or four temples irregularly, as at Gozo, within a stone's throw of one another, on a bare piece of ground, far away from any centres of population. The same is the case at Hagiar Khem, where certainly three, probably four, sets of chambers exist; and Mnaidra may almost be considered a part of the same group or cemetery.
Malta, it is said, was colonised by the Phœnicians, at least was so in Diodorus' time,[2] though how much earlier they occupied it, we are not told, nor to what extent they superseded the original inhabitants. We also learn incidentally that they possessed temples dedicated to Melkart and Astarte. This is very probable, and if so, their remains will be found near their harbours, and where they established themselves; and Colonel Collinson informs me that remains of columnar buildings have been found both at Marsa Sirocco and near the dockyard creek at Valetta. These, most probably, are the remains of the temples in question, though possibly rebuilt in Roman times. The little images found in the apartments at Hagiar Khem may be representations of the Cabeiri, though I doubt it; but little headless deformities, 20 inches high, some of stone and some of clay, are not the divinities that would be worshipped in such temples, though they might be offerings at a tomb.
If these buildings were tombs, they were the burying-places of a people who burnt their dead and carefully preserved their ashes,
