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Tetradrachm
| Issuer | Knossos |
|---|---|
| Year | 150 BC - 90 BC |
| Type | Standard circulation coin |
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| Obverse description | Diademed and bearded male head facing right, traditionally identified as Minos, legendary king of Crete. The portrait is rendered in a bold, expressive Hellenistic style with deeply modelled features, prominent brow, and a full curling beard. The diadem is clearly visible across the brow. The design is contained within a beaded border encircling the flan. |
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| Reverse description | Square meander labyrinth occupying the central field, rendered in a rectilinear, maze-like design with multiple concentric angular corridors converging toward the centre — an allusion to the mythological Labyrinth of Knossos. The ethnic legend ΚΝΩΣΙΩΝ is distributed in three lines across the field surrounding the labyrinth, reading KNΩ / Σ-I / ΩN. |
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| Additional information |
Knossos, by the second century BC, was no longer the dominant power it had been in earlier Cretan politics, and this tetradrachm belongs to a period when the city was maneuvering carefully between Roman encroachment and the endemic inter-city warfare that characterized late Hellenistic Crete. The island's cities maintained independent coinages well past the point when most of the Greek world had capitulated to Macedonian or Seleucid monetary systems — a function of Crete's stubborn political fragmentation rather than any particular prosperity.
Rome finally ended it in 67 BC when Quintus Caecilius Metellus subdued the island after a brutal three-year campaign, earning himself the cognomen Creticus. Coinage from Knossos effectively ceased shortly after.