Stater

Knossos resumed autonomous coinage in the fifth century BC despite — or perhaps because of — its complicated relationship with Cretan federal politics. The city never joined the Cretan koinon on equal terms and used its own silver issues partly to assert that independence. This early stater type, catalogued as the first in both Svoronos and the British Museum corpus, anchors the entire chronology of Knossian coinage and has informed most subsequent die studies of the series.