The earliest _historical_ connection between Aryan Europe and Africa was brought about by the Greeks, commencing some 600 years B.C.[20], who settled in the country of Kurene (Cyrene), the modern province of Barka. After the repulse of the Persians there was a great expansion of Greece. Prior to the historical establishment of settlements in the Ionian Islands, in Sicily, at Marseilles and on the east coast of Spain, Greek seamen had no doubt ranged the coasts of the Mediterranean; and from their adventures were evolved the fascinating stories of the Argonauts and Ulysses. Prehistoric settlements of Greeks on the coast of Tunis are believed by modern French ethnologists to have taken place, on the strength of the well-marked Greek type to be found amongst the present population, for instance, in the Cape Bon peninsula; but these Greek types may also be descended from the Byzantine occupation of the country in the Christian era. The Island of Lotos-Eaters, of Greek mythology, would seem with likelihood to take its origin in the island of Jerba, where the date palm is indigenous[21]. But about 631 B.C. an expedition of Dorians from the island of Thera[22] founded the colony of Kurene on the north coast of Africa, where that continent approaches closest to the Greek Archipelago. The settlement of Kurene was situated about ten miles from the sea at an altitude of nearly 1800 ft. on the forest-clad Aχdar mountains. Around Kurene (a name corrupted to Grenna by the Arabs) were grouped four other cities—Barke, Teuχeira, Euesperides, and Apollonia. This Greek colony continued to exist with varying fortunes—threatened at times with dissolution through the civil wars of the colonists and the intermittent attacks of the Berbers—till it came under the control of Rome 100 years before Christ. It was occasionally dominated by the Greek dynasty of the Ptolemies in Egypt. Though the civilization of the Cyrenaica was finally extinguished by the disastrous Arab invasion in the seventh century of the Christian era, it had nevertheless received a death-blow in 117 A.C. by an uprising of the Jewish settlers, who attacked the Graeco-Roman colonists with the help of the native Libyans and slew more than 200,000 of the descendants of the Greek and Italian invaders. The Jews in their turn were massacred, and after that most of the Cyrenaic cities fell into decay.