Minyans

Homer (Iliad I, 594, VIII, 293-294 – as well as Strabo, 7, 46) mentions as first inhabitants of Lemnos the Sintians, who originated from Thrace. After them, Karians, Minoans from Crete, Mycenaeans and Minyans from Thessaly came to the island. Many pottery finds attest the influence of Minoan Crete and the presence of Mycenaeans on Lemnos. 

The close relations between the Minoans and the Minyans become clear through myth. According to the ancient historian and author Diodorus Siculus (V, 79.2), when the Cretans led by the general Thoas sailed in the Aegean to dominate the islands, they founded on Lemnos, which the ruler of Knossos Rhadamanthys had gifted to Thoas, a small settlement and Thoas became its first king. Thoas married Myrina, daughter of the King of Iolkos Keretheus, and they had a daughter Hypsipyle, who later married Jason, when he came ashore on Lemnos with his Argonauts.

Lemnos was colonized by the Minyans, a prehistoric Hellenic tribe, in the thirteenth century BC. They founded a city on the rocky peninsula upon which the castle now stands, and they named it Myrina, after the wife of the first king of Lemnos. Homer narrates in the Iliad (VII, 467-475) that King Euneos, grandson of Thoas, supplied the Achaeans besieging Troy with wine and in exchange received bronze, iron, cattle and slaves. Furthermore, the Minyans supplied the Achaeans with weapons of their own making, as they were excellent smiths. Finds of Mycenaean clay figurines and potsherds bear witness to these relations with the Achaean

In order to protect themselves, the Minyans fortified the city they founded with walls built of huge boulders, the so-called Cyclopean Walls. It is suspected that the boulders were obtained from the peninsula site.

The Minyans were expelled from the island by the Pelasgians, when they settled on Lemnos after the end of the second millennium BC. The Pelasgians reinforced the Minyans’ fortification walls, which are today defined as Pelasgian.