00:00Now, we wouldn't call this island mystical unless there were tales of giants living here.
00:06The island of Gauzo in Malta is the backdrop of an ancient legend.
00:11Malta is an island country located in the Mediterranean Sea, just south of Europe.
00:16It's a very strategically located archipelago.
00:19Throughout history, it was ruled by many different societies,
00:22such as the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, and Carthaginians.
00:26One cold night, thousands of years ago, a farmer noticed the sky turn orange, then red, when he heard a loud thump.
00:36Although the ground seemed to be moving, this wasn't an earthquake.
00:39When he looked toward the woods, he saw a giant silhouette, taller than the trees.
00:45As he fearfully approached, he realized it was a woman, a giant woman.
00:50She introduced herself as Sansuna.
00:52Unlike the terrible giants of many tales, Sansuna didn't want to exterminate the human race.
00:59She was loving and caring.
01:01She told the farmer that she and her people could help protect their land from invaders.
01:05The locals were pretty interested in this offer.
01:08Since Malta is located in an important commercial route, it was constantly being invaded.
01:13The story says that Sansuna settled in Malta.
01:19And sooner rather than later, she was moving things around.
01:23And when I say things, I mean monoliths.
01:26Sansuna carried huge stones on her shoulder to build a magnificent temple called Gigatia, which means place of giants.
01:34She even did this while holding her half-giant, half-human kid on the other shoulder.
01:38Some say Sansuna lived exclusively on beans and honey, although others replaced honey with water.
01:46The funniest bit here is that Malta is the 10th smallest country in the world.
01:50But it somehow managed to host giants.
01:53Hey, go figure.
01:54The temple looked like a giant game of Tetris, with some stones weighing as much as 20 elephants.
02:01Some of these monolithic rocks are so heavy, scholars guess it would take 50 men working together to lift just one stone.
02:09Now, as much as this is entertaining, humans never proved giants were real.
02:13So, this story couldn't be true.
02:16There's a brief mention of a species of giants called the Nephilim in some ancient texts.
02:21The Nephilans would have been terrible giants that wreaked havoc on the Earth and only survived until the Great Flood.
02:27But nobody ever found real proof of this species really existing on Earth.
02:32Until this came along.
02:34The world of Maltese archaeology unearthed quite a few shocking things in the past years.
02:40One of them are known as the Hypogeum skulls.
02:44Hypogeum is the Greek word for underground, and this incredible site was discovered in the first decade of the 20th century.
02:50Back then, Malta's National Museum director received an important phone call.
02:56Someone had accidentally dug some impressive bones and asked him to come check it out.
03:01The Hypogeum looked like an underground city, filled with mazes and rooms that stretched along multiple floors.
03:08They were all made with similar limestones, as the Maltese temples above ground.
03:13The Hypogeum was filled with important relics and artifacts.
03:17Scientists quickly understood that the Hypogeum was built as a type of final resting place for locals.
03:22So, along with skulls, they found a lot of bones and skeletons.
03:27One of these artifacts were skulls.
03:29But these weren't regular human skulls.
03:32Rather, they were of the elongated type.
03:35To make matters worse, these skulls were hidden from the public for years.
03:39People started to talk and created a bunch of theories behind it.
03:43The truth is that this discovery was a turning point for Maltese archaeology,
03:48although scientists didn't know what to do with it.
03:50Some wondered if these skulls were natural or manipulated,
03:54since they knew some cultures in the world used headbinds to alter their skulls.
03:59Other scientists threw in the hypothesis of little gray people or even the legendary giants.
04:04Some say that the elongated skulls could have been sculptures that worshipped otherworldly deities.
04:10There was no way to confirm any of these theories.
04:13So, the question remained.
04:15Who were the builders of Malta's megalithic temples?
04:18Now, let's take a look at what scientists know.
04:22The Maltese megalithic temples have been standing strong since 3500 BCE,
04:28which is even older than the pyramids of Egypt.
04:30The main dilemma here is that these temples were built even before we invented writing.
04:36Yet, they required advanced technological skills to exist.
04:40The Gigantia Temple seems too absurd to have been built by humans.
04:44The South Temple has a corridor with four oval rooms on the sides, looking like a big shamrock leaf.
04:51In one of these rooms, scientists found altars, decorated with spiral patterns.
04:56It looked like an altar of some sort, indicating early Maltese people used them for ritualistic purposes.
05:02The North Temple is similar, but smaller, with a very low entrance that makes people crouch down to get inside.
05:09You get it?
05:10You need to bow down to their deities in order to get into this sacred place.
05:14I mean, one can't help but wonder about the secret reasons these ancient builders had to build such a huge temple.
05:21I'm thinking they probably cast one of Daenerys' dragons to move the monoliths around.
05:26Yeah, I'm joking here.
05:27But hey, remember the entrance to King's Landing?
05:30Yup, the series used the Medina Gates in Malta as the exterior of King's Landing during Episode 3 of Season 1.
05:38Anyways, back to the giants.
05:41The ritualistic theory of the whole thing won a few points when archaeologists uncovered these mysterious figures.
05:47They're popularly known as Fat Ladies.
05:50These tiny statues have round bodies and faces that show how much they enjoyed life.
05:55They kind of look like a miniature Sunsana, the giantess we talked about.
06:00Scientists believe these were statues that celebrated well-being and prosperity.
06:05It does prove that the people of the time had advanced craftsmanship skills,
06:09and they were pretty intentional with their constructions and art manifestations.
06:14One of these statues is known as the Sleeping Lady.
06:17This Neolithic piece of art depicts the figure of a large woman lying on her side, sleeping.
06:23After studying it deeper, scientists guessed this statue was meant to represent the Great Reaper.
06:30It was found in the Hypogeum, which we now know was a huge resting place.
06:34This specific statue is different from all the other fat ladies, starting with the hair and the embroidered skirt.
06:41Then there's this statue.
06:43This is supposed to represent an 8-foot-tall woman and the rim of her skirt.
06:47She was discovered in the most unusual of ways.
06:51A farmer was trying to plow his field, but he kept hitting large blocks of stone.
06:55All the way back in 1915, the farmer called Malta's National Museum director and asked him to come check it out.
07:03Some think this is all the proof you need to confirm that Sunsana was real.
07:08Others aren't all that sure.
07:09But that's not all.
07:12The place where this giant statue was buried revealed one of Malta's most impressive archaeological sites, the Tarjan Temples.
07:20The temples were made from limestone blocks.
07:23Some are 20 feet tall and weigh around 20 tons.
07:26Zamet, the museum director, kept digging and discovered multiple sites made of megalithic stones.
07:32All of them, supposedly built by Stone Age farmers, all stranded on a remote island in the Mediterranean Sea thousands of years ago.
07:41It just doesn't make sense.
07:43I mean, look at these temples in Menedra.
07:45This is probably the world's earliest calendar.
07:47On the equinoxes, the Sun passes directly through the main doorway, straight down the central axis.
07:54On the solstices, there are two superb variations.
07:57During the summer solstice, the rays fall on the edge of the megalith to the left of the doorway.
08:03And during the winter, the rays fall to the right side of the doorway.
08:07It's astronomical precision at its finest.
08:10And what about the structures in the Hall Tarsian that we've already talked about?
08:15This complex is the oldest one in all of Malta.
08:18It was built with the purpose of doing animal offerings to deities.
08:22Scientists confirm this by unearthing numerous animal bones buried in the soil.
08:27They also found a great collection of spirals, indicating that the locals also used this temple for ritualistic purposes.
08:35Overall, there are seven megalithic temples in Malta, each more impressive than the other.
08:41Scholars keep on digging to see if they can uncover the truth,
08:44much like researchers do with the pyramids of Egypt, the lost Mayan cities in the Americas, and other sites.
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