How the Maltese people came to be

An island that is hard to find

Malta lies in the middle of the Mediterranean, about 80 km from Sicily and 200 km from North Africa. That is close enough to reach by boat from Sicily, but far enough that early people without good boats rarely found it. The islands are small (316 square kilometres) and made of limestone. There are no rivers, only a few seasonal springs, and the soil is thin, so rain is the only water supply. What the islands do have is superb natural harbours.

Every people who has lived on Malta came from somewhere else, by sea. That is why the story of the Maltese is a story of arrivals.

The first visitors

Excavations at Għar tal-Latnija, a cave in Mellieħa, show that hunter-gatherers were living on Malta at least 8,500 years ago, about a thousand years before the first farmers. They most likely came from Sicily, a crossing of at least 100 km of open sea, probably in dugout canoes. They ate birds, fish, seals, sea snails, sea urchins, red deer and tortoises, and made simple sharp flakes from local limestone.

The first farmers

About 7,500 years ago, around 5500 BC, farming families crossed from Sicily, bringing domestic animals, crops and pottery. Archaeologists call this the Għar Dalam phase, after the cave near Birżebbuġa, whose top layer holds the remains of these first farmers. Pollen records show that a thin woodland once covered the islands. As the farmers cut down trees for fields, rain washed the soil away, and the land never fully recovered.

After roughly five hundred years the first farming community faded. There is then a long gap, perhaps eight hundred years or more, in which there is very little sign of people on the islands.

The temple builders

Around 4000 BC a new group arrived, again from Sicily, bringing rock-cut tombs and their own styles of pottery. In the centuries that followed they built the Megalithic Temples: clusters of rounded rooms behind great stone walls, with open forecourts where people gathered, probably for feasts. UNESCO lists seven of them, among them Ġgantija on Gozo, Ħaġar Qim, Mnajdra and Tarxien, and dates them to the fourth and third millennia BC, which makes them some of the earliest free-standing stone buildings in the world. The Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, a burial place carved underground from the rock, is a UNESCO site of its own. Nothing like these buildings was made in Sicily. They are Malta's own invention, and some are aligned with the rising sun at the solstices and equinoxes.

The temple culture lasted for about 1,500 years without a break, which is unusual anywhere in prehistoric Europe. Archaeologist Caroline Malone suggests that crowding on a small island may be one reason: people could not move away or fight each other, so they competed by building bigger and feasting more.

The word "temple" was given to these buildings by their early excavator, Themistocles Zammit. Nobody knows for certain that they were places of worship.

Between about 2500 and 2300 BC the climate became drier and less stable, and the thin soil wore out further. Skeletons from this time show a poorer diet, with less meat and more cereal, and more disease. The temples were abandoned, and the people may have lingered for a few centuries more.

A new people in the Bronze Age

From about 2200 BC to 800 BC newcomers arrived with metal tools and a new way of burying their dead: cremation. The islands were no longer isolated. Ships now linked Malta to the wider Mediterranean, and it was a time of pirates and unrest. People built fortified settlements such as Borġ in-Nadur and stored grain in large silos. They also began to grow olives and vines.

Across the islands there are pairs of deep grooves in the rock, known as "cart ruts". Nobody has been able to say for certain what made them. They date from the end of the temple period to the Bronze Age, and one idea is that they were used to move earth to terraced fields.

Phoenicians, Romans and Byzantines

The Phoenicians, great sea traders from the coast of what is now Lebanon, reached Malta in the eighth century BC. Drawn by its natural harbours, they made it a stepping stone on their trade routes. Later the Carthaginians took over, and in 218 BC, at the start of the Second Punic War, Malta passed to Rome.

Roman rule lasted until the middle of the fifth century AD. The islands prospered, and wealthy families built fine houses such as the Roman Domus at Rabat. Christianity took hold, and the catacombs at Rabat are the best-known remains of the Christian communities of these centuries. In 535 AD the islands passed to the Byzantines, who ruled for about 350 years, until the Aghlabids, an Arab dynasty, conquered Malta in 870.

The Arabs and the Normans

Many historians think the conquest of 870 left the islands almost empty. Around 1045 a group of Arabic-speaking settlers came over from Sicily and resettled them, and their speech became the root of Maltese. In 1091 Count Roger the Norman took control, and Malta became part of the Kingdom of Sicily, which it remained until the Knights arrived in 1530. Arab rule had ended for good, and Maltese went on developing on its own.

Maltese genetics tells the same story. Research by the Maltese Genome Project found that most Maltese can trace their ancestry to Sicily and southern Italy about a thousand years ago, and that Middle Eastern DNA, including Lebanese, makes up less than five per cent. It found little sign of Phoenician ancestry.

A language of its own

Maltese comes from a medieval form of Arabic. Scholars still debate whether it came to Malta by way of Sicily or directly from North Africa, but it is closely related to the Arabic spoken in Sicily around the year 1000. After Arab rule ended, Maltese took in many words from Sicilian and later from Italian, and from English during British rule. About a third of its vocabulary is of Arabic origin and more than half comes from Sicilian and Italian, but its grammar is still Semitic.

It is the only Semitic language written in the Latin alphabet, with extra letters (ċ, ġ, ħ, ż and the pair għ) for sounds Latin does not have. Since 2004 it has been an official language of the European Union. An old idea that Maltese descends from Phoenician or Punic was raised in 1536 and argued over for centuries, but scholars have found no evidence for it.

You can hear its history in the map. Għajn means "spring" in Maltese, as in Għajn Tuffieħa, and the same Arabic root appears in many place names and surnames. Many Maltese also understand Italian, thanks to Italian television and trips to Sicily.

Knights, French and British

In 1530 the Emperor Charles V gave Malta to the Knights of St John, who had been driven out of Rhodes in 1522. After the Great Siege of 1565 the Knights built a planned new city, Valletta, founded in 1566, and moved there from the Three Cities in 1571. It has star-shaped forts, the Knights' auberges and the Co-Cathedral that holds Caravaggio's paintings. Each village also built a church for its patron saint, and the friendly rivalry between villages is part of why Malta has so many grand churches and festas.

The Order ruled until June 1798, when Napoleon took the islands. The Maltese rose against the French that September, and with British help the French surrendered in 1800. Malta stayed British until independence on 21 September 1964. It became a republic in 1974, joined the European Union in 2004, and was awarded the George Cross in 1942 for its courage in the Second World War, when it was one of the most heavily bombed places on Earth.

Who the Maltese are

The Maltese are the people of the islands of Malta, Gozo and Comino, with a language, a history and a culture of their own, shaped over the centuries by the Catholic Church. Gozitans, the people of Gozo, are Maltese too, with a strong island identity of their own.

What is unique to Malta is what its people made of all these arrivals: a language, a landscape of villages and churches, and a way of life that is entirely their own.

Much of the prehistory above follows a talk by Professor Caroline Malone, an archaeologist who has excavated in Malta since 1987 with Heritage Malta and the University of Malta, listed under Videos below. The later history follows Maltese sources: the University of Malta, Heritage Malta, Visit Malta and the National Council for the Maltese Language.