Older Than the Famous Monuments, and a Giantess Who Built It

Ggantija predates the pyramids of Giza and Stonehenge's sarsen circle by more than a thousand years, and local folklore already had its own explanation for who could possibly have built it.

Older than the more famous monuments

Constructed from around 3600 BCE, Ggantija is among the oldest surviving freestanding stone structures in the world, considerably predating the Giza pyramids and the main construction phases at Stonehenge, a chronological priority that gives Malta's megalithic temples an outsized claim to antiquity relative to their comparatively modest modern fame.

A giantess did it, according to Gozo

Local Gozitan folklore attributes the temple's construction to a giantess named Sansuna, said to have carried the massive stones on her head, in some versions of the story while carrying or nursing a baby at the same time, a folk explanation for the scale of the megaliths that long predates modern archaeological interest in the site and reflects how implausible the construction feat appeared to later generations without any surviving record of how it was actually done.

A name whose meaning outlived its builders

The name Ggantija itself derives from the Maltese word for giant, embedding the folklore explanation directly into the site's modern name, a naming pattern paralleling how Carnac's stones were explained through Christian legend once their original builders and purpose had been forgotten.