Tas-Silġ

Where it sits. Tas-Silġ occupies a low hilltop on the neck of the Delimara peninsula in southeastern Malta, between Marsaxlokk Bay on one side and St Thomas Bay on the other. The position is the whole point: from the summit both anchorages are visible, and any ship approaching the island's best natural harbour from the south passes beneath it. The name comes from the nearby church of Our Lady of the Snows — silġ is Maltese for snow or ice — which stands a short distance away on the Marsaxlokk to Żejtun road. The excavated area is fenced and lies among fields, with the Delimara power station chimney and the fish farms of Marsaxlokk in the middle distance.

Four thousand years of the same cult site. Tas-Silġ is not important for its architecture, which is fragmentary, but for continuity that has few parallels anywhere in the Mediterranean. The sequence runs roughly like this. A megalithic temple of the Tarxien phase was raised here around 3000 BC, part of the same building culture as Ħaġar Qim and Ġgantija. Bronze Age activity followed. From about the eighth or seventh century BC Phoenician and then Punic settlers built a sanctuary on the same spot, dedicated to the goddess Astarte, reusing the Neolithic megaliths in their own walls. Under Roman rule the sanctuary continued as a temple of Juno. In late antiquity, around the fourth to sixth centuries AD, a Christian basilica with a baptistery and monastic buildings was constructed over it. Occupation of the hill continued into the Islamic period and later. The same ground held a place of worship, more or less without a break, for something close to four millennia.

Cicero's evidence. The Roman phase has an unusual documentary anchor. In his prosecution of Gaius Verres in 70 BC, Cicero accused the former governor of Sicily of stripping the temple of Juno on Melita — Malta — of its treasures, including ivory. Excavation at Tas-Silġ recovered carved ivory fragments and large quantities of votive material, which is why the site is generally identified with the temple Cicero described. Inscribed dedications in Punic and in Greek naming Astarte have also been found here. Related to the same cult are the Cippi of Melqart, a pair of small marble monuments with a bilingual Punic and Greek inscription recorded in this part of the island in the seventeenth century; the bilingual text became a key to the decipherment of the Punic script, and one of the pair was given to France in the eighteenth century and is now in the Louvre while the other remains in Valletta.

Excavation. The site was investigated between 1963 and 1970 by the Italian Archaeological Mission to Malta, directed by Michelangelo Cagiano de Azevedo, which also worked at Ras il-Wardija on Gozo in the same years. Their work established the long sequence and recovered the bulk of the votive material. From 1996 the University of Malta resumed excavation on the northern part of the site, and Italian teams have also returned; work has continued in campaigns ever since, which is one reason the site is not permanently open.

What you actually see today. Low walls, trenches, column bases, cut rock and reused megaliths, laid out over a hillside — the kind of site that gives up very little to a casual look and a great deal to a good guide. The clearest features are the massive prehistoric blocks incorporated into later walling, the outline of the Christian basilica with its baptismal font, and the rock-cut cisterns. There is no visitor centre and no permanent interpretation, and the fenced perimeter is what most visitors see. Heritage Malta and the university have run periodic open days and guided visits, usually announced in advance and heavily subscribed.

Getting there and timing. Marsaxlokk is the obvious base, twenty minutes away on foot down the hill, with its Sunday fish market and waterfront restaurants; buses from Valletta serve Marsaxlokk and Żejtun. The site is signposted from the Żejtun road. Spring and autumn are best, as the hilltop has no shade at all. Combine it with the walk out to Delimara Point and its lighthouse, or with St Peter's Pool for a swim, and the archaeology stops feeling like a detour and starts feeling like the reason the whole peninsula was settled in the first place.

Why it matters more than it looks. Malta's headline prehistoric sites tell a single-period story and then stop dead around 2500 BC. Tas-Silġ tells the other story — of an island repeatedly resettled, reused and re-dedicated by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines and Arabs, each of whom found the same hill above the same harbour worth holding. Standing at the fence with Marsaxlokk below and the megaliths built into a Punic wall in front of you is the most efficient short lesson in Maltese history available anywhere on the island.