The rise of a maritime strategic island : Malta under the Phoenicians & the Romans

Abstract

Many of us are familiar with the Braudelian adage that the sea is at the same time an agent of separation and of connectivity. The Maltese islands' connectivity with the outside world, a connectivity that from prehistory to the 19th century was only possible by sea, became even more crucial for their development with the appearance in the central and western Mediterranean of two colonizing peoples, both originating from the eastern half of that same sea: the Phoenicians and the Greeks, most probably in that chronological order. As from the mid-8th century BC their colonizing movement grew into a source of rivalry and quest for new territorial possessions that often provoked hostilities and even fully-fledged wars between them. The Maltese islands seem to have fallen within the sphere of influence of the Phoenicians, if not actually fully colonized by them, before the Greeks could even consider occupying the archipelago for themselves. It should also be noted that the geomorphology of these islands probably did not fit with the main element of the general Greek pattern of desiderata for setting up new colonies, namely, extensive fertile plains for the cultivation of cereals, of which their predominantly mountainous mother country was short.