|
Phoenicians on Malta |
Until this century, 'Malta's rich prehistoric legacy was all wrongly attributed to the Phoenicians by scholars and travellers'; and the Phoenicians certainly did settle the island, leaving rock-cut tombs as evidence of their stay, as well as the Maltese language, still easily intelligible in Tunis (though the name Malta itself is suggested to derive from the Hebrew malat, to escape). There is almost no evidence that Marlowe was aware of Malta's extraordinary wealth of temples - about thirty survive in the small archipelago - and other prehistoric structures, but there is one shadow of a suggestion, when Ferneze, facing the threat of a Turkish invasion and refusing to capitulate, declares:
Lay waste the island, hew the temples down, And, shipping of our goods to Sicily, Open an entrance for the wasteful sea, Whose billows beating the resistless banks, Shall overflow it with their refluence. (III.v.13-18) Obviously the most likely meaning for 'temples' here is 'churches'; and in the context of my project this might be in itself an attractive reading, since Malta is famous for its churches. Certainly it would make sense for Christians faced with a Turkish invasion to destroy their places of worship themselves rather than leave them to face desecration. But that word 'hew', with its connotations of rough stonework and great blows, might just suggest the more massive architecture of monumental ruins like Hagar'Qim or Ggantija; and such structures would surely have been of interest to a dramatist credited by Richard Baines' note with a distinct interest in alternative belief systems (this is a point to which I will return later in considering Marlowe's possible areas of interest in the story of Malta). The suggestion cannot, though, ever be more than a highly tentative and speculative one. Nevertheless, even without any direct reference to Malta's impressive legacy of prehistoric architecture, anyone with more than a passing acquaintance with the island must surely have been aware of the obviously non-European origins of much of its architecture, language and population. The reason given by the Knights for excluding the indigenous nobility from their number was explicitly the fear that their ancestry might be tainted by Arab elements; and Maltese as a language - lyrically described in a modern historical novel as 'the soft, slurring dialect that Dido and Hannibal spoke' - clearly proclaims its affiliation with Arabic, as is obviously demonstrated in the very place-names that were to play so marked a part in the siege: the fortified town of Birgu, the old capital of Mdina with its Rabat, the harbours of Marsamxett and Marsaxlokk. The most cursory investigation into the history and geography of Malta (and I hope to have shown that Marlowe's researches seem to have been far from cursory) would have revealed it as a place once colonised by a people of Semitic origin, who were universally believed to have been those identified in the classical world view as the Phoenicians. |
|
|