The tombs of the people who inhabited this village are, unlike the
houses, circular or elliptical in form. They are locally known as
_sesi._ The smaller are of truncated conical shape, the circular chamber
being entered by a low door and having a corbelled roof. In one of the
_sesi_ a skeleton was found buried in the contracted position. The
finest of the tombs, known as the Sese Grande, elliptical in form (Fig.
20), has a major diameter of more than 60 feet, and rises in ridges,
being domed at the top. It contains not one chamber, but twelve, each of
which has a separate entrance from the outside of the _sese._ To judge
by the remains found in the _sesi_ they belong entirely to the neolithic
period.


The island of Malta as seen to-day is an almost treeless, though not
unfertile, stretch of rock, with a harbour on the north coast which must
always make the place a necessary possession to the first sea power of
Europe. Much of its soil is of comparatively modern creation, and four
thousand years ago the island may well have had a forbidding aspect.
This is perhaps the reason why the first great inroads of neolithic man
into the Mediterranean left it quite untouched, although it lay directly
in the path of tribes immigrating into Europe from Africa. The earliest
neolithic remains of Italy, Crete, and the Ægean seem to have no
parallel in Malta, and the first inhabitants of whom we find traces in
the island were builders of megalithic monuments. Small as Malta is it
contains some of the grandest and most important structures of this kind
ever erected. The two greatest of these, the so-called "Phoenician
temples" of Hagiar Kim and Mnaidra, were constructed on opposite sides
of one of the southern valleys, each within sight of the other and of
the little rocky island of Filfla.