Ancient Libya valley, Cowper says, "There had been originally no less than eighteen or twenty megalithic trilithons, in a line, each with its massive altar placed before it." In ancient times, the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, the Persian Achaemenid Empire ("see Libya (satrapy)"), the armies of Alexander the Great and his Ptolemaic successors from Egypt, then Romans, Vandals, and local representatives of the Byzantine Empire ruled all or parts of Libya. The territory of modern Libya had separate histories until Roman times, as Tripoli and Cyrenaica. Cyrenaica, by contrast, was Greek before it was Roman. It was also known as Pentapolis, the "five
Names of the Greeks (//, "Romans") the latter of which was used since virtually all Greeks were Roman citizens after 212 CE. The term "Hellene" became applied to the followers of the polytheistic ("pagan") religion after the establishment of Christianity by Theodosius I. Most European languages, as well as other languages that have borrowed the name from one of them, use names for Greece that come from the Latin "Graecia" and "Graecus", the name the Romans used for the Greeks, itself from the Greek : In languages of Middle East and South and Central Asia, the common root is "yun" or "ywn". It is