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 Names of the Greeks The Greeks () have been identified by many ethnonyms. The most common native ethnonym is "Hellen" (), pl. Hellenes (); the name "Greeks" (Latin: "Graeci") was used by the ancient Romans and gradually entered the European languages through its use in Latin. The mythological patriarch "Hellen" is the named progenitor of the Greek peoples; his descendants the Aeolians, Dorians, Achaeans and Ionians correspond to the main Greek tribes and to the main dialects spoken in Greece and Asia Minor (Anatolia). Among his descendants are also mentioned the Graeci and the Makedones. The first Greek-speaking people, called