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
Greeks in Lebanon the Semitic word for Greeks, "Yunan"), capital of the Koura District (in turn from the Greek "χωριά", "villages") in the north of the country is a living testament of that. Following the 2006 invasion of Lebanon by Israel most Greeks have fled the country, although there remains a Greek community in Beirut (Greater Beirut) as well as in the aforementioned Koura District. There are about 7,000 Greeks living in Tripoli, Lebanon and in El Mina, Lebanon. The majority of them are Muslims of Cretan origin and some of them are of Greek Muslim origin. Records suggest that the community left