Artifacts

St. John's Co-Cathedral - Valletta, Malta

It is hard to travel in southern Europe or the Middle East without using the word "artifacts". The lands around the Mediterranean are abundant with remnants of millennia of human civilization, as are parts of India, China, and elsewhere. I remember being awed in my earliest travels by churches and Russian fortress walls that had endured from the 12th century or so in Moscow. The Mediterranean makes this look positively recent by comparison. This is as clear in Malta as anywhere, with the site of Paul's shipwreck from the book of Acts, numerous Roman ruins, and prehistoric temple remains dating back several thousand years before the Romans.  

Malta is a crossroads. A tiny island about 10 miles wide and 20 miles long, it is home to a rather densely packed 350,000 people. The architecture is in some ways definitionally southern European, with an abundance of baroque Catholic churches, grand villas, and sprawling piazzas. Yet in another way it has a deeply Middle Eastern feel, with many homes constructed in a manner you'd see in Jordan or Lebanon. Sitting almost at the middle of the Mediterranean, Malta has been a crossroads of cultures - Roman, Greek, Arab, Norman, British, and Italian, among others.  

This is visible even in the "artifacts" of language. While British English and to a lesser degree Italian are spoken nearly everywhere (Malta gained independence from Britain in 1964 and sits not far from the southern coast of Sicily), Maltese is used on most signs and is heard everywhere. Maltese is at first a disorienting language to bold in written form, with its numerous additional characters added to the Latin alphabet.  The language is Semitic, in the same family of languages as Arabic, Hebrew, and Amharic, though it is the only Semitic language to be written in the Latin script. 

A sample of Maltese and English

There are few architectural or other artifacts to recall that Malta was under Arab control for several centuries, as was its northern neighbor, Sicily. These artifacts of Muslim presence here have largely disappeared in the past few centuries. It is not dissimilar from the way in which Christian artifacts have mostly disappeared from areas that were once predominantly Christian - Algeria, Mesopotamia, Turkey, and to a lesser degree Central Asia and western China. In all of these places, once vital and numerous Christian communities died out, some over the course of centuries, while others disappeared more quickly, leaving in some places - such as Kyrgyzstan - only a few Christian tombstones written in Syriac script as physical reminders of this Christian presence.  

Times change. Things that seem permanent - even entire civilizations - pass away leaving only few artifacts in museums to remind us of what was most precious or most intimate to these people. It's a good reminder to those coming from the "young" side of the world that there's a lot of accreted experience in this world, and that it has much to teach us.  

My thinking on artifacts has been inspired in part by Philip Jenkins' The Lost History of Christianity, which is a good, readable-yet-grounded look at Asian and Middle Eastern Christianity - the "eastern half" of church history that is all too rarely told, but so very important.  Highly recommend.