Surgical Instruments on a Tomb Slab in Roman Malta

THE MALTESE ISLANDS fell under the rule of Rome in 216 B.C. With the division of the Roman Empire in A.D. 395, the Maltese archipelago is believed to have formed part of the Eastern or Byzantine Empire. Christianity was introduced into Malta in A.D. 60. As Roman law prohibited the interment of the dead inside the towns, the earliest Maltese Christian cemeteries were established outside the walls of the ancient capital Melita, now Mdina, at Rabat. These burial places consist of a series of catacombs or underground networks of galleries and vaults hewn out of the rock. The main ones are those named after St. Agatha and St. Paul. In the absence of epigraphy (barring a few incomplete and uninformative Greek inscriptions) and of literary documentation, archaeologists have ascribed the origin of these catacombs to various epochs of the Christian era ranging from the second to the fifth centuries (Caruana 1898a, Ferrua 1949a). From the non-existence of a polyandrum or pit for the burial of common people, it is surmised that these catacombs represent the sepulchres of 'the distinguished classes' of the urban population of the island. It has been estimated that the total number of tombs in the St. Paul catacomb complex was about 1400, indicating the presence of a small Christian community at the beginning of the Christian era (Caruana 1898b, Ferrua 1949b). It is not known when these catacombs fell into disuse but those of Rome were being replaced by surface cemeteries towards the end of the fourth or at the beginning of the fifth century (Caruana 1898c), although Constantine had granted the Christians freedom of worship and equality of rights with the pagans in A.D. 312 (Bellanti 1924a). In the neighbourhood of the catacomb of St. Paul is a cluster of small hypogea or underground burial chambers. They do not communicate with the main St. Paul catacomb but are independent of it and of adjacent ones. They are believed to have been burial-clubs of different corporations or associations representing various trades and crafts as was the case among pagan communities in Rome and other parts of the Roman world (Caruana 1898d, Ferrua 1949c, Bellanti 1924b). This has been deduced from the presence of tool carvings found in these hypogea. Four such representations have been discovered in four separate hypogea: (a) A set of tools consisting of 'the hammer, the pincers, the axe, the pickaxe, and other implements' cut in the wall of the antechamber of Catacomb No. 23 in St. Agatha's field. They have been identified with the tools of the carpenter and of the mason (Caruana 1898e, Becker 1913a, Zammit 1966a). (b) A slab in Catacomb No. 15 (Becker 1918b) showing carvings of 'hammers, a hatchet, two pairs of pincers, a pair of compasses, a gimlet, several nails' and other tools that have been variously attributed to the carpenter (Caruana [n.d.]) and to the tinsmith (Zammit 1966b). (c) A slab used for plugging the doorway of a burial chamber at Tac-Caghqi Catacomb, Rabat. It bears carvings of two sickles and a pick (Annual Report, 1954). (d) A stone slab with a series of tools shown in low relief and arranged in two rows (Becker 1913c) (Fig. 1).