Prehistory

At a point in time around 4,000 BC a group of Late Stone-Age Sicilian farming families left their island home to settle in a small group of islands to the south. They brought over with them their domestic animals, pottery, bags of seeds and flint implements.
They were the first Maltese.
In time these early Maltese increased and prospered and gangs of workers could now be spared from day to day chores so that they could give all of their time to the building of the temples.
The new immigrants were familiar with the use of copper although the tools they used were still being chipped out of flint as they had been for thousands of years.
At one time it was believed that the temple builders succumbed to an invasion of fresh migrants who exterminated, or enslaved, the original settlers and took over the land. The invasion theory cannot be entirely ruled out and still has its adherents. If there was an invasion, the new arrivals, who, originally, hailed from the heel of Italy would have held a difficulty in overcoming the remnants of the original stock who colonized the islands some 2,200 years before.

If the first settlers were peaceful farmers (no trace of weapons of the period has been discovered) the newcomers were more belligerent.These bronze-age farmers, there is some evidence to show that they were also pastoralists, were less civilized than the folk they had supplanted; they built no temples but re-used the older, copper-age, temples as cemeteries; their dead were cremated within the walls and the ashes were deposited in the ruins of the once hallowed buildings.
The bronze-age farmers were not allowed to enjoy their islands in peace because after some 600 years of their arrival a new wave of bronze-using warriors invaded the land, and this time it was definitely an invasion, and made it their home. This event took place around 1,200 BC. Imitating their war like predecessers, they established their settlements in easily defensible positions. The last of the three ages - the Iron-Age - is represented in the Maltese Islands by the remains of a single settlements at Bahrija (circa 900 BC).

The Phoenicians

Their homeland a narrow coastal plain, and hemmed in by their enemies beetween the mountains and the Meditterranean, the only direction in which in which the Phoenicians could expand was seawards.
The Maltese islands with their fine natural harbours was one such outpost which the Phoenicians founded around 800 BC. As it was in other countries, so it was in Malta: having gained a foothold as traders, they gradually intermarried and integrated with the bronze-age farmers. This asssimilation did not, of course, take place overnight, but when eventually did happen, the the new race became the rootstock of the Maltese people, and and the language of these people the basis of the Maltese Language.
The larger island was now called M-L-T (Malet: meaning shelter) and the smaller island was named G-L (Gol, after the broad beamed trading vessel).
In this period of the story of Malta we are in the realm of written history, and it is recorded that the overlooking the two main harbours of Malta were famous temples dedicated Phoenician Deities - one in wwhat is now the Grand Harbour, probably under the foundations of Fort St.Angelo, sacred to Melkart and another dedicated to Astarte in the aforementioned Tas-Silg area.
In the case of the Maltese Islands the Phoenicians did venture inland because their remains have been found in several places, even as far as Rabatin the centre of the island of Malta
The weaving industry that flourished before the arrivals of the Phoenicians probaly recieved an added boost and a wider export market. Pottery was now thrown on a wheel instead of being coiled as was previously the case.
The links between the Phoenicians colonies and the Mother Country were never very strong and when the Phoenician homeland was overrun it was the Phoenician colony of Carthage that took over the role of Mother Country. In many sectors of the Meditterranean littoral the Phoenicians/Carthaginians strove to establish a sphere of influence, their chief rivals in this respect being the Greeks. Surprisingly, in the Maltese Islands these differences did not seem to exist: it is not known how many Greeks lived, co-existed rather, with the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians on the island, but some undoubtedly did - civic institutions resembled their Greek counterparts and Greek coins and pottery have been found on the island. 

The Romans

The three Punic Wars were to last for over a hundred years and during this struggle between the Carthaginians and the Romans, Sicily and its appendage, the Maltese islands, were to occupy central stage in the theatre of war fo the contro of the Mediterranean.
By the of of the First Punic War, in 241 BC, the whole of Sicily had been ceded to the Romans but the Carthaginians were allowed to retain the Maltese Islands.
Peace did not last long, however, because in 218 BC a second war broke out and, learning from their past mistakes, the Romans where determined to capture the islands.
Apperently the invasion did not present great difficulties and it has been suggested that the Phoenicians on the island turned against their Carthaginians cousins and handed over the garrison to the invading Romans. The Maltese were treated more like allies than as a conquered people which land some substance to the "collaboration" theory. The Maltese kept their Punic traditions and language and their gods. The two larger islands were renamed Melita and Gaulos and it has been tentatively suggested that the name Melita was not a Romanized version of the Phoenician Malet, but derived from mel (honey) for which the islands were than famous.

With Carthage destroyed in the Third Punic War, and the Greeks overcome, the Mediterranean became a Roman Lake - The Mare Nostrum - the areas of conflict of imperial conquest now being the lands bordering this sea.
The Romans built the city of Melita, itself bearing the same name as that of the island, the city was built over an older, Punic settlement in what is now the Rabat/Medina area in Malta, and also another town in Gozo under what is now Victoria (Rabat).