City
Ptolomaide
Tolmeta · Tulmeitia (Barrington)
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Ptolemais was a city on the coast of Cyrenaica, today Tolmeta in Libya. It grew up where the inland city of Barke had its harbour, a hundred stadia from the town, and an older Greek description of the coast still calls the spot simply 'the harbour near Barke'. The Ptolemies, the Greek kings of Egypt, founded a city there and gave it their dynasty's name. The new port soon overshadowed its mother city, so thoroughly that the geographer Strabo and the Roman writer Pliny sometimes confused the two. Pliny counts it among the five cities of the Pentapolis.