Arcades (Crete)

Arcades, also called Arkades, was an ancient Greek city-state on Crete, its site near the modern village of Kefalas with a claim in antiquity to dispute Mount Ida's status as the birthplace of Zeus. During the Lyttian War around 220 BC the city allied with Lyctus against other Cretan cities, and in 183 BC it signed an alliance with Eumenes II of Pergamon; it minted its own coins between about 330 and 270 BC inscribed with the name of the Arcadians and is recorded among twenty-two Cretan cities in a sixth-century Byzantine geographer's list. Archaeological evidence also points to the worship of Asclepius at the site.