Quote Originally Posted by Sikeliot View Post
It seems also that most Maltese have one of maybe 10 Sicilian surnames, such that the population probably started out small of only several families and expanded.
Maybe the island got depopulated by the several wars that battered it's soil and the Sicilian surnames are a sort of resettlement after the depopulation.

If there were no large scale population displacement then logically, Phoenician or Carthaginian surnames would be the top-most common (since they would be the oldest inhabitants of the island [having predated the Greek or Roman invasion] barring a mass extinction event of course)