Phoenicians

About the origins of the Maltese from Gene Expression:

Last fall PBS aired a special, Quest for the Phoenicians, with Spencer Wells. Via this page I find that one of Wells' most interesting discoveries is that the island of Malta seems to exhibit a high frequency of haplotypes which suggest a Levantine origin within the past few thousand years. If you watch this video (control-f "from geneticist Spencer Wells"), note that Wells excludes an Islamic or "Neolithic farming" source for these haplotypes, so by a process of exclusion the Phoenicians seem the most plausible candidates. Seeing that Malta is a small and somewhat isolated island, it should be no great surprise that the frequency of Levantine Y lineages might be higher here than around ancient Carthage in modern Tunisia, which likely had a far larger native substrate and was subject to continuous genetic exchange with the hinterland for thousands of years after Cato's work was done.

Phoenicia from Wikipedia