Malta
Malta, officially the Republic of Malta, is an island country in Southern Europe located in the Mediterranean Sea, between Sicily and North Africa. It consists of an archipelago south of Italy, east of Tunisia, and north of Libya. The two official languages are Maltese and English but 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.
With a population of about 574,250 spread over an area of, Malta is the world's tenth-smallest country by area and the ninth-most densely populated. Various sources consider the country to consist of a single urban region, for which reason it is often described as a city-state.
Malta has been inhabited since at least 6500 BC, during the Mesolithic. Its location in the centre of the Mediterranean has historically given it great geostrategic importance, with a succession of 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 besieged by the Axis powers during World War II and was an important Allied base for North Africa and the Mediterranean. Malta achieved 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 independence; it joined the European Union in 2004 and the eurozone monetary union in 2008.
Malta's long 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 Sicily; and while Maltese and English are its official languages, between 62 and 66 percent of Maltese people speak or have significant knowledge of the Italian language, which had official status from 1530 to 1934. 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.
Malta is a developed country with an advanced, high-income economy. It is heavily reliant on tourism, attracting both travellers and a growing expatriate community with its warm climate, numerous recreational areas, and architectural and historical monuments, including three UNESCO World Heritage Sites: Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, Valletta, and seven megalithic temples, which are some of the oldest free-standing structures in the world.
Name
The English name ' derives from Italian and Maltese Malta, from medieval Arabic , from classical Latin, from Latinised or Doric forms of the ancient Greek of uncertain origin. The name shared by the Croatian island Mljet in antiquityliterally means "place of honey" or "sweetness", derived from the combining form of and the suffix . The ancient Greeks may have given the island this name after Malta's endemic subspecies of bees. Alternatively, other scholars argue for derivation of the Greek name from an original Phoenician or Punic , meaning "haven" 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 its original coastal settlements in the 10th centuryBC. The name was then applied to all of Malta by the Greeks and to its ancient capital at Mdina by the Romans. Given that Malta was colonized by the Phoenicians, not by the Greeks, and that control of the island then passed to the Carthaginians, it is far more likely that the origin of the island's name was Phoenician rather than Greek, whatever the later folk-etymological associations with the Greek, and later Latin, words for "honey."Malta and its demonym ' 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, although the 1525 Tyndale Bible used the transliteration instead. Malta is widely used in more recent versions.
History
Prehistory
Malta has been inhabited from at least, with the arrival of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers likely originating from Sicily. Discoveries at Latnija Cave led by the Maltese archaeologist Eleanor Scerri included the remains of hearths, stone tools and an abundant and diverse range of animal bones. These included indigenous red deer that are now extinct, fish and marine mammals, as well as abundant edible marine gastropods. To arrive on Malta, these hunter-gatherers had to cross around 100 km of open water, documenting the longest yet-known sea crossing by hunter-gatherers in the Mediterranean. The extinction of the dwarf hippos, giant swans and dwarf elephants has historically been linked to the earliest arrival of humans on Malta. However this seems unlikely since recent work suggests these animals went extinct many thousands of years before the arrival of the first people, and no such animals were found in association with the earliest known Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. The claim for an earlier occupation of the island by Neanderthals is widely rejected. Supplementary Information Neolithic Farmers, also originating from Sicily, are thought to have arrived on the islands by around 5400 BC. Prehistoric farming 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, in common with other ancient Mediterranean cultures, worshipped a fertility figure.File:Ggantija Temples, Xaghra, Gozo.jpg|thumb|Ġgantija megalithic temple complex
A culture of megalithic temple builders then either supplanted or arose from this early period. Around 3500 BC, these people built some of the oldest existing free-standing structures in the world in the form of the megalithic Ġgantija temples on Gozo; other early temples include those at Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra. The temples have distinctive architecture, typically a complex trefoil design, and were used from 4000 to 2500 BC. Tentative information suggests that animal sacrifices were made to the goddess of fertility, whose statue is now in the National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta. Another archaeological feature of the Maltese Islands often attributed to these ancient builders is equidistant uniform grooves dubbed "cart tracks" or "cart ruts", which can be found in several locations throughout the islands, with the most prominent being those found in Misraħ Għar il-Kbir. These may have been caused by wooden-wheeled carts eroding soft limestone. The culture apparently disappeared from the islands around 2500 BC, possibly due to famine or disease.
After 2500 BC, the Maltese Islands were depopulated for several decades until an influx of Bronze Age immigrants, a culture that cremated its dead and introduced smaller megalithic structures called dolmens. They are claimed to belong to a population certainly different from that which built the previous megalithic temples. It is presumed the population arrived from Sicily because of the similarity of Maltese dolmens to some small constructions found there.
Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and Romans
n traders colonised the islands under the name Ann sometime after as a stop on their trade routes from the eastern Mediterranean to Cornwall. Their seat of government was apparently at Mdina, which shared the island's name; the 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 on Malta mainly cultivated olives and carob and produced textiles.File:Roman Malta.jpg|thumb|Roman mosaic from the Domvs Romana
During the First Punic War, the island was conquered after harsh fighting by Marcus Atilius Regulus. After the failure of his expedition, the island fell back in the hands of Carthage, only to be conquered again during the Second Punic War in by the Roman consul Tiberius Sempronius Longus. Malta became a Civitas, a designation that meant it was exempt from paying tribute or the rule of Roman law, and fell within the jurisdiction of the province of Sicily. Its capital at Mdina was renamed Melita after the Greek and Roman name for the island. Punic influence, however, remained vibrant on the islands with Cippi of Melqart, pivotal in deciphering the Punic language, dedicated in the second Local Roman coinage, which ceased in the first indicates the slow pace of the island's Romanisation: the last locally minted coins still bear inscriptions in Ancient Greek and Punic motifs, showing the resistance of the Greek and Punic cultures.
In the second century, Emperor Hadrian upgraded the status of Malta to a or free town: the island's local affairs were administered by four duumvirs and a municipal senate, while a Roman procurator living in Mdina represented the proconsul of Sicily. In Paul the Apostle and Luke the Evangelist were shipwrecked on the islands. Paul remained for three months, preaching the Christian faith. The island is mentioned at the Acts of the Apostles as Melitene.
In 395, when the Roman Empire was divided for the last time at the death of Theodosius I, Malta, following 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. From 454 to 464 the islands were subdued by the Vandals, and after 464 by the Ostrogoths. In 533, Belisarius, on his way to conquer the Vandal Kingdom in North Africa, reunited the islands under Imperial rule. Little is known about the Byzantine rule in Malta: the island depended on the theme of Sicily and had Greek governors and a small Greek garrison. While the bulk of population continued to be constituted by the old, Latinized dwellers, during this period its 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.