People
Pentapolites
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Pentapolites means the people of the Pentapolis, the land of five cities in Cyrenaica, in what is now eastern Libya: Berenike, Taucheira, Barke, later overshadowed by Ptolemais, Cyrene and Apollonia. Oddly, no ancient text speaks of a people by this name, so the word probably stands in for the region itself, whose own name is missing from the map. The Roman writer Pliny says that Cyrenaica was also called the Pentapolitan region. Once a Greek state, it became Egyptian in 321 BC, and from 75 BC Rome governed it together with Crete.