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( Minyae)
According to Greek mythology, the Minyans (Greek ????e?) were an autochthonous group inhabiting the Aegean region. However, the extent to which the prehistory of the Aegean world is reflected in literary accounts of legendary peoples is subject to repeated revision. Before World War II, archaeologists sometimes applied the term "Minyans" differently, to indicate the very first wave of Proto-Greek speakers in the 2nd millennium BCE, among the early Bronze Age cultures sometimes identified with the beginning of Middle Helladic culture. Gray "Minyan ware" is an archaeologist's term for a particular style of Aegean pottery associated with the Middle Helladic period (ca. 2100–1550 BCE). Thus the beginning of the Middle Helladic period would be marked by the immigration of these "Minyans". According to Emily Vermeule, this was the first wave of true Hellenes in Greece. More recently, however, archaeologists and paleoethnologists find the term "Minyan" to be questionable "To call the makers of Minyan ware themselves 'Minyans' is reprehensible", remarked F. H. Stubbings.[1] "Deriving ethnic names from pottery styles is one of the most deplorable habits in archaeology," F. J. Tritsch asserted in 1974. "We cheerfully speak of the 'Minyans' when we mean a population that uses pottery we call 'Minyan'," although he was mistaken in saying that the Greeks themselves never mention the 'Minyans' as a tribe or as a people.[2] 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, if material culture can be securely linked to language-based ethnicity. Other aspects of the "Minyan" period appear to arrive from northern Greece and the Balkans (tumulus graves, perforated stone axes). According to John L. Caskey's archaeological excavations conducted in the 1950s, evidence has emerged linking the proto-Greeks to the bearers of the "Minyan" (or Middle Helladic) culture. 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"[3] and may have represented a ruling dynasty or a tribe later located in Boeotia.
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