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Libya
Index
Like the Phoenicians, Minoan and Greek seafarers had for
centuries probed the North African coast, which at the nearest
point lay 300 kilometers from Crete, but systematic Greek
settlement there began only in the seventh century B.C. during the
great age of Hellenic overseas colonization. According to
tradition, emigrants from the crowded island of Thera were
commanded by the oracle at Delphi to seek a new home in North
Africa, where in 631 B.C. they founded the city of Cyrene. The site
to which Berber guides had led them was in a fertile highland
region about 20 kilometers inland from the sea at a place where,
according to the Berbers, a "hole in the heavens" would provide
ample rainfall for the colony.
Within 200 years of Cyrene's founding, four more important
Greek cities were established in the area: Barce (Al Marj);
Euhesperides (later Berenice, present-day Benghazi); Teuchira
(later Arsinoe, present-day Tukrah); and Apollonia (Susah), the
port of Cyrene. Together with Cyrene, they were known as the
Pentapolis (Five Cities). Often in competition, they found
cooperation difficult even when confronted by common enemies. From
Cyrene, the mother city and foremost of the five, derived the name
of Cyrenaica for the whole region.
The Greeks of the Pentapolis resisted encroachments by the
Egyptians from the east as well as by the Carthaginians from the
west, but in 525 B.C. the army of Cambyses (son of Cyrus the Great,
King of Persia), fresh from the conquest of Egypt, overran
Cyrenaica, which for the next two centuries remained under Persian
or Egyptian rule. Alexander the Great was greeted by the Greeks
when he entered Cyrenaica in 331 B.C. When Alexander died in 323
B.C., his empire was divided among his Macedonian generals. Egypt,
with Cyrene, went to Ptolemy, a general under Alexander who took
over his African and Syrian possessions; the other Greek citystates of the Pentapolis retained their autonomy. However, the
inability of the city-states to maintain stable governments led the
Ptolemies to impose workable constitutions on them. Later, a
federation of the Pentapolis was formed that was customarily ruled
by a king drawn from the Ptolemaic royal house. Ptolemy Apion, the
last Greek ruler, bequeathed Cyrenaica to Rome, which formally
annexed the region in 74 B.C. and joined it to Crete as a Roman
province.
The economic and cultural development of the Pentapolis was
unaffected by the turmoil its political life generated. The region
grew rich from grain, wine, wool, and stockbreeding and from
silphium, an herb that grew only in Cyrenaica and was regarded as
an aphrodisiac. Cyrene became one of the greatest intellectual and
artistic centers of the Greek world, famous for its medical school,
learned academies, and architecture, which included some of the
finest examples of the Hellenistic style. The Cyrenaics, a school
of thinkers who expounded a doctrine of moral cheerfulness that
defined happiness as the sum of human pleasures, also made their
home there and took inspiration from the city's pleasant climate.
Data as of 1987
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