Minotaur sealstone

This is one of a number of ‘minotaur’ seals collected by Sir Arthur Evans on his travels around Crete. He suggested that designs such as this, with the head of a bull and the legs of a human, could have inspired later coins from Knossos showing the Minotaur. It is now believed that the image was an abbreviated depiction of bull-leaping which was subsequently misinterpreted.

A page of Sir Arthur Evans’s notebook compares depictions of the minotaur on sealstones and later coins.