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
Cappadocian Greeks Turks, the Cappadocian countryside remained largely Greek populated, with a smaller Armenian population even after the Ottoman conquest. During the reign of Ottoman Sultan Murad III (1574 to 1595) the region of Cappadocia became largely Turkified in culture and language through a gradual process of acculturation, as a result many Greeks of Cappadocia had accepted the Turkish vernacular and later became known as ‘Karamanlides’. This name derives from the region of Cappadocia which was called Karaman by the Turks in honor of the Turkish chieftain Karamanoglu, though the Cappadocian Greeks continued to call the region ‘"Laranda"’, its ancient Greek name.