Drachm

Knossos in the early third century BC was a city in slow decline, gradually losing ground to the rising power of Kydonia and later absorbed into the orbit of competing Cretan poleis. These drachms belong to a coinage tradition at Knossos that had been running for over a century by this point, though the city's political autonomy was increasingly precarious. The multiple SNG and Dewing concordances reflect how systematically this type was collected by nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars drawn to Cretan bronzes and silvers as a coherent regional group.