Malta, officially the Republic of Malta, is an island country located in the central Mediterranean Sea. It consists of an archipelago which is 80 km (50 mi) south of Italy, 284 km (176 mi) east of Tunisia, and 333 km (207 mi) north of Libya. The two official languages are Maltese and English; Maltese is recognised as the national language. The country's capital is Valletta, which is the smallest capital city in the European Union by both area and population.
Malta is the world's tenth-smallest country by area, the ninth-most densely populated, and the 166th most populated. Various sources consider the country to consist of a single urban region, for which it is often described as a city-state.
The island of Malta has been inhabited since at least 6500 BC, during the Mesolithic period. Its location in the centre of the Mediterranean has historically given it great geostrategic importance, with multiple powers having ruled the islands and shaped its culture and society. These include the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, and Romans in antiquity; the Arabs, Normans, and Aragonese during the Middle Ages; and the Knights Hospitaller, French, and British in the modern era. Malta came under British rule in the early 19th century and served as the headquarters for the British Mediterranean Fleet. It was sieged by the Axis powers during World War II and was an Allied base for North Africa and the Mediterranean. Malta gained independence in 1964, and established its current parliamentary republic in 1974. It has been a member state of the Commonwealth of Nations and the United Nations since its independence, and it joined the European Union in 2004 and the eurozone monetary union in 2008.
Malta's history of foreign rule and its proximity to both Europe and North Africa have influenced its art, music, cuisine, and architecture. Malta has close historical and cultural ties to Italy and especially to the island of Sicily, with 66% of Maltese people speaking or having significant knowledge of the Italian language. Malta was an early centre of Christianity, and Catholicism is the state religion, although the country's constitution guarantees freedom of conscience and religious worship. Nowadays, Malta is a developed country with an advanced, high-income economy. It is heavily reliant on tourism, attracting travellers with its warm climate, recreational areas, and architectural and historical monuments.
The English name Malta derives from classical Latin Melita, from Latinised forms of the ancient Greek Melítē (Μελίτη), of uncertain meaning, possibly from the Phoenician Maleth. The name Melítē—shared by the Croatian island Mljet in antiquity—literally means "place of honey" or "place of sweetness", derived from the combining form of méli (μέλι, "honey" or any similarly sweet thing) and the suffix -ē (-η). The ancient Greeks may have named the island this after Malta's endemic subspecies of bees. Alternatively, other scholars argue for derivation of the Greek name from an original Phoenician or Punic Maleth (𐤌𐤋𐤈, mlṭ), meaning "haven", "refuge" or "port", in reference to the Grand Harbour and its primary settlement at Cospicua following the sea level rise that separated the Maltese islands and flooded their original coastal settlements in the 10th century BC. The name was then applied to all of Malta by the Greeks and to its ancient capital by the Romans.
Malta and its demonym Maltese are attested in English from the late 16th century. English Bible translations, including the 1611 King James Version, long used the Vulgate Latin form Melita, though the 1525 Tyndale Bible used the transliteration Melite instead. Malta is widely used in more recent versions.
Malta was first inhabited starting in 6500-8000 BC, with the arrival of Mesolithic era hunter-gatherers, which likely came from Sicily. The claim for an occupation of the island by Neanderthals is widely rejected. Neolithic farmers, also originating from Sicily, are thought to have arrived on the islands by around 5400 BC. Prehistoric settlements dating to the Early Neolithic include the Għar Dalam cave site in the uppermost layers associated with domesticated animals. The Neolithic population on Malta grew cereals, raised livestock and, like many other European civilizations, worshipped a mother goddess.
A common occupation of megalithic temple-building came later, either arising from or supplanting the previous culture. Around 3500 BC, these people built some of the oldest existing free-standing structures in the world in the form of the Ġgantija temples on Gozo. Other early temples include those at Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra. These temples are the oldest standing stone structures in the world, made before the Egyptian pyramids.
After 2500 BC, Malta was depopulated for multiple decades until an influx of Bronze Age immigrants, a culture that cremated its dead and introduced smaller structures called dolmens as tombs. They likely belonged to a population different from that which built the previous temples. It is presumed the population arrived from Sicily due to the similarity of Maltese dolmens to small constructions there.
Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and Romans
Phoenician traders colonised the islands under the name Ann (𐤀𐤍𐤍, ʾnn) after 1000 BC as a stop on their trade routes from the eastern Mediterranean to the Strait of Gibraltar. Their seat of government was at Mdina, and their primary port was at Cospicua on the Grand Harbour, which they called Maleth. After the fall of Phoenicia in 332 BC, the area came under the control of Carthage. During this time, the people of Malta mostly produced olives, carob, and textiles.
During the First Punic War, the island was conquered by Roman general Marcus Atilius Regulus. After the failure of his expedition, the island fell back into the hands of Carthage, only to be conquered again during the Second Punic War in 218 BC by the Roman consul named Tiberius Sempronius Longus. Malta became a Foederata Civitas, meaning it was exempted from tribute, and fell within the jurisdiction of the Roman province of Sicily. Its capital was renamed Melita after the Greek and Roman name for the island. Punic influence, however, remained on the islands. Local Roman coinage, which ceased in the first century BC, indicates the slow pace of the island's Romanisation: the last locally minted coins bear inscriptions in Ancient Greek and Punic motifs, showing Maltese resistance of the Greek and Roman cultures. The Roman period also introduced highly decorative mosaic floors.
In 395, when the Roman Empire was divided for the last time at the death of Theodosius I, Malta and Sicily fell under the control of the Western Roman Empire. During the Migration Period as the Western Roman Empire declined, Malta was conquered or occupied a number of times. In 454, the islands were subdued by the Vandals and the Ostrogoths took over in 464. In 533, Belisarius and his army, on his way to conquer the Vandal Kingdom in North Africa, reunited the islands under Byzantine rule. Little is known about Byzantine Malta: the island depended on the theme of Sicily and had Greek governors and a small Greek garrison. While the bulk of population continued consist of the old Latinized dwellers, Malta's religious allegiance oscillated between the Pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople. The Byzantine rule introduced Greek families to the Maltese collective. Malta remained under the Byzantine Empire until 870, when it was conquered by the Arabs.
Arab period and the Middle Ages
Malta became involved in the Arab–Byzantine wars, and the conquest of Malta is linked with the Muslim conquest of Sicily that began in 827 after Admiral Euphemius' betrayal of his fellow Byzantines, requesting that the Aghlabids invade the island. The Muslim chronicler and geographer Ibn ʿAbd al-Munʿim al-Ḥimyarī recounts that, in 870, following a violent struggle against the defending Byzantines, the Arab invaders, first led by Halaf al-Hadim and later by Sawada ibn Muhammad, pillaged the island, destroying the most important buildings and leaving it practically uninhabited until it was recolonized by the Arabs from Sicily in 1048–1049. Malta would be a settlement for Banu Matkud, which was a vassalised tribal city state from Misrata during both Fatimid Caliphate and the Aghlabid dynasty. It is uncertain whether this new settlement resulted from demographic expansion in Sicily, a higher standard of living in Sicily, or the civil war that broke out among the rulers of Sicily in 1038. The Arab Agricultural Revolution introduced new irrigation, cotton, and some fruits. The Siculo-Arabic language was adopted on the island from Sicily, and it eventually evolved into the Maltese language.