One of the great mysteries of this world is the Maltese cart ruts. They appear all over the islands. We still don’t know what they are, or what they were for. This article explains what we do know about them, and the current hypothesis.

Description

The cart ruts, as we call them, are a network of 30 km¹ tracks or grooves gouged in the rock. They look like the sort of tracks you would see when a cart regularly runs along the same path. They are about as wide as old carts used to be so it’s easy to see why people call them this.

Inconsistencies

There are a few problems with this assumption:

1. Wear and tear alone does not create such precise parallel lines.
2. Some of the ruts are 60 cm (2 feet) deep². No historical cart that we know of was high enough for this to be useful.
3. Some pairs of tracks are uneven. Some are so much deeper than the other to make transportation impossible.
4. In some cases the ruts narrow down to a point creating a V shape. This makes transportation difficult if not impossible³.
5. They do not follow paths, or connect settlements, or lead to (or from) any particular resource. There is no explanation why people needed to transport carts over these areas at all.
6. There is no convincing hypothesis why there isn’t wear and tear caused by the animals pulling the carts³.
7. Some ruts run up and down hills – one at a 45 degree angle. Transporting anything to nowhere at that angle is not worth the bother⁴.

All this suggests the cart ruts are not, in fact, cart ruts.

You can see these cart ruts in Siggiewi where a vast network criss crosses the bleak landscape. (There are many other examples across the islands, but none is as vast as this one.)

This is not far from Buskett which is connected with the legend of the Maltese Falcon.

This is ‘Clapham Junction’. An unknown Englishman gave it this name because it reminded him of the busy London train station².  Some of these tracks head off cliffs, others run into the Mediterranean sea and on the seabed².

If they carts caused the ruts this would be at a time when the geology of the islands was different to what it is today. Geology tells us this is impossible because the islands have been the same since the dawn of man.  

So what are they?

Mystical explanations

In the 1970s, Swiss Erich von Daniken suggested only aliens could have created these cart ruts³. He suggests they are landing strips for advanced civilisations⁵.

I doubt aliens walked these islands, much less criss-crossed them with cart ruts. I also can’t imagine a sleek USS Enterprise docking on Malta’s south-western coast!

If we rule out exotic conspiracy theories, what does this leave us with?

Explanations

There are several credible explanations.

Archeologists date the cart ruts to 2 000 BC, at the beginning of the Bronze Age². Archeologist Anthony Bonanno thinks they’re more likely to be from the Phoenician period, around 700 BC². The consensus amongst all my sources is that they must be old because they also exist underwater. This implies they appeared when water levels were lower.

Sir Themistocles Zammit, Malta’s foremost and first archeologist and historian, studied them in detail. He thinks wear and tear caused some, and humans carved others on purpose⁶. He didn’t explain why humans carved them, but his scientific mind settled on a man-made solution. Since the tracks are straight, almost parallel, I agree the source is artificial rather than natural.

Debate

Journalist Graham Hancock thinks the ancients carved them out of the rock on purpose⁵. He argues that since they couldn’t be carts, they must have another purpose⁵. He concludes they must be hand made. This doesn’t make sense; just because they cannot be carts it doesn’t follow they must have been hand made.

In the 1920s, academics debated Sir Temi’s suggestions in archeological journals⁶. The opinions differ between whether they were all caused by carts, and whether the carts were pulled by men or by animals⁶. It’s not clear from the writings of the time why the type of animal pulling the cart is relevant.

Professor Derek Mottershead from the University of Plymouth has an explanation after tests he ran in the early 2000s. He ignored the ruts’ size or distribution and instead imagined the forces needed to create them¹.  He and his team figured out that a laden cart fitting those dimensions would exert enough stress to cause such tracks on wet rock¹. Under these conditions the rock could lose up to 80 % of its strength and would cave in¹.

We don’t know what the climate was like in those days, but Malta doesn’t see many storms during the year. I like the scientific approach and I agree this could explain them. The length and breadth of the cart rut network implies more rainfall than you’d expect to see in Malta. We don’t have any information to support this hypothesis.

Since there is no documentation from those days, I doubt we will ever know the precise reason for it.

Possibilities

Recent explanations for the Nazca lines in Peru hold some hope for a proper explanation. Satellite imaging matched those lines with underwater water channels which makes it likely the Nazcans used them to track and obtain water, always a precious resource⁷.  Who knows, the Maltese cart ruts could be nothing more than a way to track resources. 

One thing’s for sure; this Maltese mystery isn’t going to give up any secrets any time soon.

Share this with someone who’s convinced aliens visited Earth sometime!

References

1. Ancient mystery solved by geographers; University of Plymouth; 2009-04-20[↩][↩][↩][↩]
2. Prehistoric Lines Across Malta Defy Explanation; Liz Leafloor; Ancient Origins; 2015-04-24[↩][↩][↩][↩][↩]
3. Are Malta’s cart ruts Signs of the Gods?; Cart ruts Malta; 2016-03-20[↩][↩][↩]
4. Maltese cart-ruts; Ancient wisdom; (Retrieved 2019-07-27) [↩]
5. Malta’s Cart Ruts – Proof of Ancient Advanced Civilizations?; Beyond Science; 2017-06-22[↩][↩][↩]
6. Maltese Cart-Ruts; Antiquity Volume 8, Issue 31; 1934-09[↩][↩][↩]
7. Satellite Images Revealed the Secret Meaning of These Ancient Desert Spirals; Kaleigh Rogers; Vice; 2017-05-16[↩]

Remember: links were correct at time of publication.