The Hellenes will credit Cadmus with the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet, phoinikeia grammata.

Herodotus, who gives this account, estimates that Cadmus lived sixteen hundred years before his time, or around 2000 BCE.

Cadmus founded the city of Thebes, and its acropolis was originally named Cadmeia in his honor.

Cadmus, or Kadmos, in Greek mythology, was the son of Agenor and the brother of Phoenix, Cilix, and Europa.

He is the grandfather of the Greek god Dionysus, through his daughter with Harmonia, Semele.

Legend has Thebes occupied originally by Boeotia’s aboriginal (autochthones) Ectenians under the leadership of Ogyges (Ogygus), called Ogygion by some classical poets.

Greek legend attributes the founding of the ancient citadel, Cadmea, to the brother of Europa, Cadmus, who was aided by the Spartoi (a race of warriors sprung from dragon's teeth that Cadmus had sown).

The building of the celebrated seven-gated wall of Thebes is usually attributed to Amphion, who is said to have charmed the stones into moving by the playing of his lyre.

Archaeological evidence indicates that the site was inhabited in both the early and late Bronze ages.

Frescoes of Theban women in Minoan dress adorn the fifteenth-century BCE Minoan-style palace at Cadmea; some Cretan vases also suggest contacts between Thebes and Knossos in the period 1450-1400 BCE. (Clay tablets confirming Mycenaean-Minoan links will be found in 1970,  while the discovery of Mesopotamian cylinder seals in 1964 will strengthen the theory that Cadmus, “a Phoenician,” introduced writing to Greece.)

According to Greek myth, Cadmus' descendants ruled Thebes intermittently for several generations, including the time of the Trojan War.

The 1909 excavation of the "House of Cadmus.” whom legend states was born in Tyre and taught letters to the Greeks, of a collection of Mesopotamian cylinder-seals, including one referring to a Kassite king who ruled between 1381 and 1354 BCE, indicates that this myth may have some historical basis.

Thebes, apparently one of the first Greek communities to be drawn together within a fortified city, owes its importance in prehistoric days—as later—to its military strength.

Deger-Jalkotzy claims that the statue base from Kom el-Hetan in Amenhotep III's kingdom (LHIIIA:1) mentions a name similar to Thebes and considers it to be one of four (Danaan?) kingdoms worthy of note (alongside Knossos and Mycenae).

Thebes has lost contact with Egypt in LHIIIB but has gained contacts with "Milatos" (Hittite Milawata) and "Cyprus" (Hittite Alasiya), growing to rival Argolís as a center of Mycenaean power until its palace and walls are destroyed shortly before the Trojan War.

The myth of the "outlandish" and "savage" Seven who threatened the city in Seven Against Thebes, an Oedipus-themed trilogy produced by Aeschylus in 467 BCE, has traditionally seemed to be based on Bronze Age history in the generation before the Trojan War, when in the Iliad's Catalogue of Ships only the remnant Hypothebai subsists on the ruins. (According to tradition, the sons of the Seven destroyed the city.)

Thebes in the late LHIIIB is able to pull resources from Lamos near Mount Helicon, and from Karystos and Amarynthos on the Greek side of the isle of Euboea, according to Palaima ("Sacrificial Feasting", Hesperia 73, 2004).

The neglect of Thebes in the Homeric poems is a perplexing feature of Theban history.

As a fortified community, it attracts attention from the invading Dorians, and the fact of their eventual conquest of Thebes lie behind the stories of the successive legendary attacks on that city.

The central position and military security of the city naturally tends to raise it to a commanding position among the Boeotians, and from early days, its inhabitants have endeavored to establish a complete supremacy over their kinsmen in the outlying towns.

This centralizing policy is as much the cardinal fact of Theban history as the counteracting effort of the smaller towns to resist absorption forms the main chapter of the story of Boeotia.

Thebes is governed by a landholding aristocracy who safeguard their integrity by rigid statutes about the ownership of property and its transmission.

Of the earlier history of the city, no details have been preserved.

Knowledge of succeeding centuries in Thebes is sparse following the destruction of the Mycenaean period city at the beginning of the Iron Age.

Immigration has produced a Boeotian mixed stock, including the Aegeids, a Dorian clan, and an oligarchy of large estates is regulated by laws passed about 725.

The Boeotian League first develops as an alliance of sovereign states in Boeotia, a district in east-central Greece, about 550 BCE, under the leadership of Thebes.

…conspicuous among the “Medizers” is Thebes, whose hostility to Athens over mutual interest in the Plataea district leads to Theban collaboration with Persia, while …

Thebes and most Boeotian cities side with the Persians after the defeat of the Greeks at Thermopylae, but …