From temple builders older than the pyramids to the Knights, the Great Siege and an independent republic.
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The Order of St John rules Malta for 268 years, survives the Great Siege and builds Valletta.
Farmers who reached Malta from Sicily raised megalithic temples older than Stonehenge and the pyramids of Giza.
Sea traders, then Rome: Malta becomes a harbour on the great Mediterranean routes.
Arab rule leaves its mark on the Maltese language; Norman Sicily brings the islands into medieval Europe.
Almost four months of fighting that decided who would control the central Mediterranean.
Two years of French rule, then a British colony and naval base, and a second great siege in the Second World War.
An independent state, a republic and a member of the European Union.
TRUE GLOBE
A broad travel-history documentary covering the temples, Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, the Knights of St John, British influence, Valletta and the Great Siege.
Watch on YouTube ↗These videos are on YouTube. Nothing is loaded from YouTube until you press play. Videos are in English.
From the siege of Mdina to the George Cross: how the Maltese stood up to invaders.
Temple builders, Phoenicians, Arabs and Knights: the arrivals that made the Maltese and their language.
Bobbins, pins and the eight-pointed cross: Maltese lace and the women who kept it alive.
From the first farmers and cave dwellers to a living language and traditions.
The first people reached Malta from Sicily about 8,500 years ago, by boat, bringing seed, animals and pottery. They were farmers, and they began clearing and working the land. Archaeologists name this first phase of settlement Latnija.
Early islanders sheltered in natural caves and rock overhangs. At Għar il-Kbir near Dingli, families were still living in the caves in the 1800s, a reminder of how long cave dwelling lasted on the island.
Għar Dalam, near Birżebbuġa, is a cave whose layers hold the bones of animals that lived here long before people did, and also evidence of the first human settlement. Heritage Malta runs it as a museum and says it holds more than 160,000 years of record.
Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Knights and the British all ruled Malta, and each left a mark. Yet Maltese remained the language of the people. It descends from Arabic, with words from Italian, Sicilian and English, and is the only Semitic language written in the Latin alphabet. Festa and ftira are now on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage, and show how daily culture carried on.
Some online videos argue that Malta's old buildings and megalithic sites are far older or stranger than archaeologists say, and that its history was "rewritten". These are claims, not established findings: the geological and archaeological evidence does not support them.
180 year-old photographs of "The Island of The Giants" (Malta) · Jarid Boosters (YouTube, 2026)
Uses early photographs of Malta to argue that its fortifications and ruins could not have been built as history records, and that the Knights "rebuilt" the island and rewrote its story.
Watch the video on YouTube ↗The temples are built from Malta's own limestone, and radiocarbon dating places them between about 3600 and 2500 BC. The legend that giants raised Ġgantija gave the site its name, but archaeologists explain the temples as the work of farming communities moving the stone blocks with simple tools.
The photographs the video uses are real: some of the earliest ever taken in Malta, by Calvert Richard Jones in 1846. See them on the French and British Malta page.
Ġgantija Archaeological Park (Heritage Malta) ↗