noun
definition
The minimum number of ten (male) adult Jews required for a communal religious service.
definition
(by extension) A Jewish prayer service.
definition
A member of the Minyan race of Greek mythology
Examples of minyan in a Sentence
Minyan immigrants then settled at various places on the coast and even appear to have penetrated into the interior and to have founded Amyclae.
At this festival it was originally the custom for the priest of the god to pursue a woman of the Minyan family with a drawn sword and kill her.
But if we assume that he was the aboriginal Hellenic High God, we must be quite ready to admit that the separate communities were always liable to cherish other divinities with a more ardent and closer devotion, whether divinities that they brought with them or divinities that they found powerfully established in the conquered lands, Athena or Hera, for instance, in Attica or Argolis, or Poseidon in the Minyan settlements.
Minyan and Ionian worship, and surrounded with a peculiar sanctity as having been, from time immemorial, an inviolable refuge for the pursued.
But Amyclae and Therapne (Therapnae) seem to have been in early times of greater importance than Sparta, the former a Minyan foundation a few miles to the south of Sparta, the latter probably the Achaean capital of Laconia and the seat of Menelaus, Agamemnon's younger brother.
In reality this Dorian immigration probably consisted of a series of inroads and settlements rather than a single great expedition, as depicted by legend, and was aided by the Minyan elements in the population, owing to their dislike of the Achaean yoke.
It is probable that the island was not dorized before the 9th century B.C. One of the earliest facts known to us in its history is its membership in the League of Calauria, which included, besides Aegina, Athens, the Minyan (Boeotian) Orchomenos, Troezen, Hermione, Nauplia and Prasiae, and was probably an organization of states which were still Mycenaean, for the suppression of the piracy which had sprung up in the Aegean as a result of the decay of the naval supremacy of the Mycenaean princes.