Phoenician Stone Symbols
Melita Historica. 9(1985)2(145-169)
[p.145] FR MANWEL MAGRI’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE CONSERVATION OF MALTA’S ARCHAEOLOGICAL HERITAGE. Salv. Mallia
Fr Magri was a Maltese priest at the turn of the 20th century who was interested in the stone symbols placed on the roofs of houses and on the top of garden walls, especially at their junction. These "symbols" were "usuallly cut out of polished or rough stone" into "geometrical figures of various sizes and description, such as cones, conoids, balls, pyramids, pyramidal conoids, on or without a base, undressed pyramidical blocks, etc. Poor people are satisfied with a rough stone".
In Fr Magri's opinion these figures represented Tanit, the national deity of Carthage, they were a "Baal and Astarte symbol". They were "copies of the Phoenician religious symbols of our ancestors", as the similarity of these "comparatively modern geometrical figures on our walls" to the ex-voto cippus from Borg in-Nadur plainly showed.
Fr Magri asked the government to make 18 photos of an original drawing of his, representing reproductions of these symbols, for he desired to make a complete collection of these figures "still existing in great numbers in these islands". He wished to know exactly the places where similar symbols still existed, for this would have been of great interest to scholars and archaeologists. He also suggested that a notice be published, soliciting information as to the whereabouts of such symbols. His wishes were met. The photos were made, and a notice was published in the government Gazette no. 4689 of 26 February 1904, asking for information "as to the localities in which such symbols are to be found," to be passed on to the Curator of the Museum.
Some drawings by Fr Magri
click to enlarge
Some of our own pictures of this
phenomenom, taken during the prospection in May 2005
click to enlarge