History of Malta - 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, hags of seeds and flint implements. They were the first Maltese. In time these early Maltese increased and prospered and gangs of workers could now lie spared from the 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 were an invasion, the new arrivals, which, originally, hailed from the heel of Italy, would have had no 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 warlike predecessors, they established their settlements in easily defensible positions. The last of the three ages of antiquity - the Iron Age - is represented in the Maltese Islands by the remains of a single settlement at Bahrija (circa 900 BC).
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