Stater

Knossos in the fourth century BC was trading heavily on a mythological identity it had been cultivating for centuries — the Minotaur legend was not incidental local folklore but an active political and commercial brand. The city had long ceased to be the Bronze Age palace-centre of Minoan civilization, yet its civic coinage consistently exploited that deep ancestry to assert prestige among Cretan poleis competing for regional dominance.

The Svoronos Cr#45 classification places this piece within a well-documented sequence, though die linkage studies by later scholars have revealed considerable variety within the type — attribution to a specific die pairing can affect collector valuation significantly.