Malta Antica: The Complete Archaeological Project by Luigi Maria Ugolini

Edited by Andrea Pessina, Nicholas C. Vella

Published by Midsea Books, 2021

Luigi Maria Ugolini died, barely 41 years old, in 1936, when he had published only a fraction of his archaeological findings about the megalithic civilisation of Malta.

His conclusions proved revolutionary and quite disturbing to the academic establishment of his times – Malta, he asserted, was the real cradle of origin of European civilisation rather than the British-promoted Aegean. Malta had preceded Crete, and any other known focus of pioneer cultural activity, not by a few decades, but by thousands of years.

This attracted scorn and mockery, mostly from top British archaeologists, on Ugolini’s head. John D. Evans could, as late as 1971, wonder, cocksure in his effortless British superiority, how in 1934 it was still possible for anyone to back Ugolini’s nonsense “without bringing immediate ridicule on its author”. And Sir John L. Myers, Oxford professor of ancient history, in 1936, expressed publicly his shock that anyone would take Ugolini seriously.

Ex oriente lux had become dogma for British academia. Then comes this war-damaged Eyetie usurper with his fantasy Ex medio lux. Ha, ha and ha again.

This, consciously or otherwise, reflected the tensions that bedevilled Maltese politics up to the very end of the ’30s – the worship of colonialism on one part, versus the struggle to retain Malta’s cultural Italianità on the other. This conflict distorted virtually everything – politics, very naturally, but also learning, taste, history, all the way down to archaeology.

In Malta, football fanaticism, to this day, either for the Azzurri or for St George’s Three Lions, inexcusable after almost 60 years of independence, traces its roots to these old and eclipsed political battles. Malta has always been relentlessly plagued by its history.

This concerted British attack on Ugolini and his findings quickly brought about his almost total damnatio memoriae, a punitive and deliberate deletion of memory, the classical example of which was how the Venetians dealt with their delinquent Doge Marin Faliero.

In their sumptuous Council chamber, the Venetians hung a portrait of every Doge of Venice, but when it came to Faliero, they placed no portrait, but instead framed a black shroud, with an inscription “Marin Faliero, for his crimes”.

Since the British Lion had roared, Ugolini, like Faliero, ended almost obliterated from memory. It is sad that even the leading Maltese archaeologist, the genuinely erudite and kindly polymath Sir Temi Zammit, who privately befriended and admired Ugolini, never summoned the pluck to stand up for him publicly, though their archaeological conclusions broadly coincided. What? Defy our colonial owners? Proclaim an Italian right and British academia infallibly wrong?

But history pushes its own bizarre ironies and its subtle karma. It had to be later British scientists who were to prove scientifically British academia dismally wrong and the maligned Italian upstart triumphantly right. Calibrated Carbon-14 tests, virtually infallible, confirmed Ugolini’s early dating of Malta’s megalithic structures.

David Trump’s further excavations and Colin Renfrew’s research are now in perfect syntony with Ugolini’s findings and endorsed the very essence of their substance. So, who has egg on his face today?

If anything, the present DNA and radiocarbon research by the dedicated Caroline Malone of Belfast University and her team, on the bones and cereals excavated in Gozo, push back the datings of settlements by farmers by a further 700 years. If Lenie Reedijk’s astounding findings in Sirius, based on astro-archaeology are accepted, that threshold is to be pushed further back by millennia.

And to think that Ugolini reached his extraordinary conclusions without ever being allowed by the colonial authorities to excavate one sliver of stone in Malta. They only permitted him to observe and photograph.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that they stitched a guard to his heels to ensure he did not as much as scratch the surface of Maltese soil. In Malta, its most genial archaeologist was condemned to be a digger without a spade.

I must register a personal interest. Though Ugolini’s, and my, life overlapped by only (and exactly) four months, his was a household name at home.

My father Vincenzo, when Curator of Fine Arts at the National Museum, was probably his closest friend in Malta, and also his fixed point of cultural reference during his multiple stays on the island. To the point that when Ugolini suffered a romantic crush on a lady in Malta (Maltese?), it is to father that he confided and asked for assistance.

The surviving correspondence does not mention the name of Ugolini’s muse – perhaps Mari, one of Sir Arturo Mercieca’s daughters. In his 1947 memoirs, Sir Arturo acknowledged his affection for the archaeologist “an extremely well-mannered young man, so pleasant in conversation, we valued his friendship and spent unforgettable hours in his company. Honour to his memory and peace to his generous soul”.

One of the present volumes publishes in facsimile some of the letters, telegrams and postcards sent by the archaeologist to my father.

Ugolini only lived to see one of his Malta volumes printed, in 1934, before his death barely two years later, though he was then working on a lot more. Thankfully no one pulped his papers or his sizeable archive of photographs and sketches.

The Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico ‘Luigi Pigorini’ in Rome got hold of them and there they lay, devalued, dormant and disremembered, bubble wrapped in oblivion, until 20 years ago.

The project to resurrect Ugolini turned into a long, ambitious and incredibly arduous one. Instead of excavating a site, Prof. Nicholas C. Vella of the University of Malta and Dott. Andrea Pessina, Superintendent of Archaeology in Florence 20 years ago teamed up to excavate an archive. Their mission: to give life to the rare spirit of the maligned prophet.

Malta, Ugolini asserted, was the real cradle of origin of European civilization

The results of their literally herculean endeavours are now there for all to see, five magnificent volumes published by Midsea Books with the support of the government of Malta and of Heritage Malta. The first in 2012, the final four in September 2021.

One should see these volumes as a fitting, and overdue, monument to Ugolini. But, bottom line, they are also a monument to the two authors, Pessina and Vella, to their vision, their inexorable erudition, their pit bull perseverance. Other academics too gave copiously of their learning: Josef M. Briffa, Anton Bugeja, Mario Cappozzo, Henry Frendo and Oliver J. Gilkes. I do not hesitate to classify this launch as the most pregnant Maltese editorial achievement of the decade.

Do not expect a bewildered book-reviewer, anything but an archaeologist, to compress the 1,800 large-format pages that make up the five volumes, into a 1,000-word newspaper feature. It would be physically impossible, intellectually deceptive and overall demeaning. Instead of ‘reviewing’ the contents I am just jotting down a few observations prompted by perusing this overwhelming collection, the text and the graphic supports – sketches and photographs.

Three of these last four volumes contain all the known unpublished writings by Ugolini about prehistoric Malta together with a competent English translation, all lavishly illustrated by photographs and sketches, some drawn by him personally, while others could be the works of artists in his team, like Igino Epicoco and Carlo Ceschi. Not to mention innumerable photographs of the sites and the artefacts retrieved, now mostly preserved in the collections, public and reserve, of the National Museum of Archaeology.

While Maltese private collections groan under the weight of Punic and Roman artefacts, megalithic wares are extremely scarce outside museums. When the eliminated graduate in archaeology Daphne Caruana Galizia and I collaborated in 1996 on a project to record what megalithic pottery and other artefacts were housed in private collections, the results proved so meagre we ended almost giving up.

Ugolini’s photography deserves special mention. As expected, he used the camera functionally to capture a record of scenes and objects relevant to his interests. This he did to technically high standards, but always with an eye on aesthetics too.

Often, to establish scale, he placed people in the composition and the balance between inanimate and animate certifies the skills of a professional photographer. His camera trigger-happiness earned him a reputation, in those paranoid times, of being a fascist spy planted in Malta.

His preoccupation with aesthetics exudes from the style of his writings too – elegant, clear and articulate, never pandering to arcane obscurity, in the illusion that difficulty of comprehension makes writing sound profound – the way some present-day Italian writers of technical texts seem to believe.

The now-published findings of Ugolini are still very current archaeology. Their value is not their antiquarian interest – not by any stretch are they merely a record of where archaeology stood a hundred years ago. It is that, but it is also much more than that.

A lot of what Ugolini states or speculates has value-added present-day resonance. His was one step forward in the dynamics of archaeology. But in that continuum of studies and discoveries, Ugolini’s contribution proves much more than just one of several milestones.

In fact, he was the very first to survey all the known prehistoric antiquities holistically. Even much later archaeologists, including Evans, fail to match Ugolini’s breath of vision.

His minute attention to detail, recorded in his photographs, allowed him to establish correctly the sequence of the great structures, from Ġgantija the earliest to Tarxien the latest.

As also his identifying those edifices as related to religious worship, a conclusion doubtful till then.

Zammit and Ugolini are now also proved right in rejecting the anachronistic Aegean link and pushing back drastically the dates of the structures, and in forecasting the future eloquence of undisturbed stratigraphy.

Luigi Maria Ugolini made Malta proud. Placing the island securely as the forerunner of European civilisation, he paid Malta the highest homage ever.

It is time that Malta started paying back that debt. I looked around and could not find one minuscule alley, on the periphery of nowhere, that is named after him.