Minyans

According to Greek mythology and legendary prehistory of the Aegean region, the Minyans (Greek: Μινύες, Minyes) were an group inhabiting the Aegean region. However, the extent to which the prehistory of the Aegean world is reflected in literary accounts of legendary peoples, and the degree to which material culture can be securely linked to language-based ethnicity have been subjected to repeated revision.

The Mycenaean Greeks reached Crete as early as 1450 BCE. Greek presence on the mainland, however, dates to 1600 BCE as shown in the latest shaft graves. Other aspects of the "Minyan" period appear to arrive from northern Greece and the Balkans, in particular tumulus graves and perforated stone axes. John L. Caskey's interpretation of his archaeological excavations conducted in the 1950s linked the ethno-linguistic "Proto-Greeks" to the bearers of the "Minyan" (or Middle Helladic) culture. More recent scholars have questioned or amended his dating and doubted the linking of material culture to linguistic ethnicity.

Greeks did not always clearly distinguish the Minyans from the Pelasgian cultures that had preceded them. Greek mythographers gave the Minyans an eponymous founder, Minyas, perhaps as legendary as Pelasgus (the founding father of the Pelasgians), which was a broader category of pre-Greek Aegean peoples. These Minyans were associated with Boeotian Orchomenus, as when Pausanias relates that "Teos used to be inhabited by Minyans of Orchomenus, who came to it with Athamas" and may have represented a ruling dynasty or a tribe later located in Boeotia.

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