There is a lot of history to get through for such a small island, so I am going to attempt to condense it just a little bit.
Let’s go right back to when early Sicilians floated over in search of pastures greener and landed about 5,000 years B.C., to become the first known settlers on Malta. Go and take a look at the Tarxien temples and the Hypogeum among others, and you’ll get some idea of what early Maltese got up to in their spare time. One of the things was probably killing and eating pygmy elephants and hippos, which was a shame. You can go see the skeleton of one of these at the Ghar Dalam museum. One archeologist even suggested that the discovery of such skeletons may have led to the belief in Cyclops’, as the skulls just had one big hole for the trunk which could have been mistaken for an eye socket. Although he may have been one of those off-the-wall archeologists who believes in lay lines and alien interventions and stuff… Okay, I don’t want to get bogged down here, too much history, too little space. So everybody left the island in 2500BC and about 100 years later a new bunch of bronze age people arrived.
The Greeks turned up in around 700BC and settled down in the vicinity of Valletta. Then 100 years later the Phoenicians arrived to set up camp in Mdina. I don’t mean that they were neighbours living down the road from each other and cheerily waving when their paths crossed. Both civilisations just based themselves in different locations after respectively conquering the island, that’s all. After Phoenician fortunes took a turn for the worse the islands fell into the hands of Carthage, who promptly (historically speaking) lost it to Rome. The Roman Empire collapsed eventually, as you may have been told, and so Malta came under Byzantium control, and there may have been some Germanic tribes sticking their oars in at various points too. Are you still following all this? We’re up to about 900AD now, all in the space of a few lines. This is a brief history.
The Arabs came along and nabbed Malta during the course of their war with the Byzantiums. It’s at this stage the Maltese language developed as a kind of mix of Arabic and Sicilian. But can that be right? I mean the Normans then took over in 1091, and being from Normandy they certainly wouldn’t have been speaking a similar lingo. That seems like a very short time to develop a new language, doesn’t it? I mean it’s less than 200 years that the Arabs were in charge. Although some people believe that the Arab invaders expelled all the original inhabitants and gave the land to their own people, which would explain things a bit better.
We’re into the middle ages now, and in the interests of speeding things up a little, I’ll just say that Malta came under the control of various European dynasties over the next few hundred years, finishing up in the hands of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V by the early 1500’s.
Now I am going to collect my thoughts and take a break. Back soon with Part II.
In the meantime people who may have rather a more in-depth appreciation of the history of Malta can play a game of ‘spot the historical inaccuracy’. That’s not a very nice game though, is it?
Images: (D.Finnin/AMNH & wikipedia commons file)
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