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Erich Lessing

Long before Odysseus supposedly dallied on Malta with the nymph Calypso, the island was the site of a great, lost civilization. Some of its stone temples and megalithic structures—such as the temple of Hagar Qim in southern Malta (shown here)—date to the mid-fourth millennium B.C.E. One of the oldest freestanding stone monuments in the world, Hagar Qim is constructed from a series of vertically arranged stones, some of them weighing as much as 20 tons.