Every city in today’s Egypt, Libya, Algeria and Sudan that became Greek between the first colonies and the Arab conquest, and every bilingual city where Greek was spoken beside Egyptian or another language that lived on: when Greek came, how, and when its last Greek speakers were gone. And what outlived the cities: the Patriarchate of Alexandria.
Pick a period to see the cities that became Greek or bilingual in it, in colour; the cities that already had Greek speakers are grey, and a dark ring marks a city whose last Greek speakers were gone by the end of the period. Or drag the year slider to see which cities had Greek speakers in any year from 650 BC to AD 1000. Hollow dots are doubtful as cities, dashed rings can be placed only within their region, and triangles at the edge point to the three cities beyond the map. Hover or tap a dot for its name; select it for the full record and, for some cities, their stories.
The scholars, poets and philosophers some of these cities gave the Greek world, and a few things that happened in them.
Greek speech left the cities within about two centuries of the Arab conquest. The church did not leave. The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria lived through centuries in which its flock spoke Arabic and its patriarchs often resided in Constantinople. It came back to Alexandria in 1846/47, as Greek merchants settled in Egypt, and from the 1920s it took in the Orthodox of the whole continent; its patriarch is styled Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria and All Africa. Its rank is ancient, set by the ecumenical councils: at Nicaea (325) it stood with Rome and Antioch at the head of the church, second after Rome, and from the councils of Constantinople (381) and Chalcedon (451) it has ranked second among the sees of the East, after Constantinople, the place it still holds among the Orthodox churches.
Greek nationals at each census, the peak in 1927 (Dalachanis 2017); today, an estimate of the Greek Foreign Ministry. Greeks of other nationalities are not counted.
Sources: the Patriarchate of Alexandria (its hierarchy as listed in October 2026; where no seat is stated, the capital is assumed); Butler, The Arab Conquest of Egypt; Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque (2008); Hamilton, The Church of Alexandria in Modern Egypt (2006); Dalachanis, The Greek Exodus from Egypt (2017); Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt 1919–1937 (1989); the Greek Foreign Ministry; the Dictionary of African Christian Biography. Sizes of the communities outside Egypt are estimates, many of them for the whole country.
Carthage is not counted here as a Greek or bilingual city. Its people spoke Punic, and later Latin. Greek residents are recorded in 396 BC, and Greek monks and refugees in the 7th century AD, but Greek was never one of the city’s main languages.
Ancient DNA adds evidence of another kind. Ringbauer and colleagues (Nature, 2025) studied genomes from Punic sites across the Mediterranean, among them 17 people from Carthage and 27 from Kerkouane on Cape Bon. Most of their ancestry came from a genetic profile like that of Sicily and the Aegean: 84% of the people of Carthage and Kerkouane had more than half of this Sicilian–Aegean ancestry. North African ancestry was a minority, though large in some individuals, and ancestry from the Levant, the Phoenician homeland, was almost absent.
The genomes cannot tell Sicily and the Aegean apart. The authors name contact with the Greek colonies of the central Mediterranean and of Cyrenaica as one possible source. An earlier study of Kerkouane (Moots and colleagues, Nature Ecology and Evolution, 2023) had already found people there whose ancestry resembled that of present-day Italians and Greeks, buried beside people of North African ancestry.
Ancestry is not language. These were Carthaginians in culture, who wrote Punic. The genomes show how mixed the Punic world was, and how much of it came from the Greek side of the sea. They do not make Carthage a Greek city, but raise the possibility that Greeks were among its inhabitants, perhaps adopting the language and culture of the city: an episode of linguistic conversion either in Africa or in the source of these genetically Aegean–Sicilian people.
H. Ringbauer et al., “Punic people were genetically diverse with almost no Levantine ancestors”, Nature 643 (2025), 139–147, doi:10.1038/s41586-025-08913-3. Genome-wide data for 210 individuals from 14 sites; the Punic individuals date from the 6th to the 2nd century BC.
H. M. Moots et al., “A genetic history of continuity and mobility in the Iron Age central Mediterranean”, Nature Ecology and Evolution (2023), doi:10.1038/s41559-023-02143-4. Kerkouane, Sant’Imbenia and Tarquinia.
On the Punic period cards and in Carthage’s entry under Left out.
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Select a row for the full record. ? after a name: doubtful as a Greek city or as a site. Bilingual city: Greek spoken beside the town’s own language, which lived on. † a Greek city with a bilingual period. “by AD 5”: first dated by the register of the gymnasial class of the nome capitals. Grey names under Today are villages. Dates of fading are approximate.
The ten images: the overview, one map per period, the rise and fade, the Patriarchate that outlived the cities, today’s Egypt and Libya, and the list by region.
A self-governing city, a royal or Roman foundation, a nome capital or a bishop’s see, not a camp, fort, sanctuary or trading post, whose residents spoke Greek. The evidence: a polis in the Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis, a foundation by a Hellenistic king or a Roman emperor, Greek civic institutions, the metropolis of a nome, a city in Hierocles’ list (c. 527), or a see with a bishop at the councils. In every case there must be positive evidence of resident Greek speakers: officials, a garrison, a court, and Greek used only in the liturgy or in learning do not count. The site must lie in present-day Africa; Egypt includes Sinai.
When the place became Greek: its foundation for a Greek foundation; otherwise the first evidence of Greek-speaking residents. A refoundation on the same site keeps the earlier date (Ptolemais, the harbour of Barke). For 26 nome capitals with no earlier evidence of their own, the date is AD 4/5, when Rome registered the gymnasial class of the nome capitals; many of them surely had Greek settlers under the Ptolemies, but it is not documented town by town, so these dates are floors, shown as “by AD 5” and hatched in the timelines.
A bilingual city had many Greek-speaking residents, but its own language lived on beside Greek. That is the rule for the nome capitals of Egypt, where Egyptian, written in Demotic and then in Coptic, remained the language of most townspeople; Greek was the language of government, of the gymnasium and of many households. Cirta kept Punic and Libyan, and Pharan Arabic. A bilingual city has its own colour, is never said to have become Greek, and its dates are when Greek was spoken there. Four Greek cities had a bilingual period (†): Naukratis, Antinoopolis, Ptolemais Hermiou and Berenike on the Red Sea.
The town on the site is the one whose built-up area covers the ancient city; ruins outside a town count as ruins. A governorate capital of Egypt, or a district seat of eastern Libya, counts if it stands within about 2 km of the city or bears its name. Names are traced through Coptic, Arabic or Latin.
Eight research batches by region (the western and eastern Delta, Middle and Upper Egypt, the Red Sea and the oases, Cyrenaica, the Maghreb, Nubia), then four checks: the start dates, the end dates, the edge cases, and completeness against Hierocles’ list, the nome capitals, the lists of bishops and the royal foundations. The bishops of the Delta sees follow Worp’s checklist of the bishops of Egypt (1994), and the identifiers the Pleiades gazetteer. Every record keeps its sources and notes; the places considered and left out are listed with a reason. Each city’s “Who ended it” line names the act and the people closest to the end of Greek there; no ban on Greek speech is recorded anywhere.
The full table with every field, sources and notes, as a CSV table, as JSON, or as a spreadsheet with the places left out, the year-by-year series, the stories, the sees of the Patriarchate and the Greek communities.
Sources: M. H. Hansen and T. H. Nielsen, An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis (2004); Herodotus, Strabo, Ptolemy, Hierocles; papyri and inscriptions; Bagnall, Egypt in Late Antiquity (1993); Fournet (2009); Papaconstantinou (2010); Sijpesteijn (2013); Butler, The Arab Conquest of Egypt; Cohen, The Hellenistic Settlements (2006); Mueller, Settlements of the Ptolemies (2006); K. A. Worp, a checklist of the bishops of Egypt AD 325 – c. 750 (ZPE 100, 1994); the Pleiades gazetteer. Map: Natural Earth; today’s borders dashed.
These calls rest on thin or conflicting evidence. The map, the chart and the list follow the reading shown here; the alternative is given so that readers can weigh it themselves.