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
Byzantine Greeks Greeks (Yunani) in matters of culture." The Muslim Ottomans also referred to their Byzantine Greek rivals as Rûm, "Romans", and that term is still in official use in Turkey for the Greek-speaking natives (Rumlar) of Istanbul "cf." Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople (, "Roman Orthodox Patriarchate"). Many place-names in Anatolia derive from this Turkish word (Rûm, "Romans") for the Byzantines: Erzurum ("Arzan of the Romans"), Rumelia ("Land of the Romans"), and Rumiye-i Suğra ("Little Rome", the region of Amasya and Sivas). Byzantine Greeks, forming the majority of the Byzantine Empire proper at the height of its power, gradually came under the