Are there any Iron ancient coins?

or even fourrees?
I've never come across an ancient coin made of iron, even though there are some nickel coins minted in Greece.
The closest we can get is probably Marc Antony's Leg denarii, while obviously it's silver, Pliny mentions that Antony mixed iron as part of the alloy!

 

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The only ancient nickel coins I'm aware of were minted in Bactria (which was certainly Hellenistic, though I wouldn't call it "Greece" as it's roughly where Uzbekistan is today). There were definitely iron cash in medieval China, not sure how far back exactly they go (I don't have the time to dig through Hartill right now). Though they were issued in huge quantities, most have since rusted away entirely, and if you want to collect them you have to be satisfied with very ugly specimens.

 

One of the Greek authors (Herodotus? Xenophon? I can’t remember…) mentions that the Spartans used iron coins, but to my knowledge none have ever been found

 

For an explanation about the quote of Pliny, here’s a comment by @Andrew McCabe :

https://www.forumancientcoins.com/board/index.php?topic=69302.msg434526#msg434526

 

I know, for I have read it several time, of ancient forgeries made of an iron core covered with a bronze layer. But never heard of regular issues made of iron

Q

 

Years ago I recall seeing a broken hollow copper shell with traces of 'rust' which I was told was a 'fourree' as of Nero. Iron does not survive well in many circumstances. How commonly they made fake coppers, I do not know.

 

You said "ancient" but the only mentions are of Greece, Rome, and Bactria.

Don't forget about China! They have some iron cash coins. Not as fancy as those "other" cultures....but it fits the bill

I don't have an example to share unfortunately.

EDIT: Whoops, I missed Parthicus' mention. My bad. It was a looooong night.

 

@Parthicus
@furryfrog02
Ban Liang Coins, Western Han type, 220-180 BC, Hartill 7.28

 

I haven't heard of any, yet they might have existed in classical times (outside of China). I know lead tokens have been found in Egypt, but iron typically rusts and fades away to nothing when in contact with moisture or even just the air (oxidation). In rare cases iron chain mail fragments or platelets from the lorica segmentata, the legionary armor common in the latter 1st century and 2nd century, have been found.

 

I believe the Spartan iron coinage was of small iron bars, but not of round coins. The story of the iron currency was recorded by Plutarch in his writing about the Laconian founding father, Lycurgus, about six hundred years before the time of Plutarch. Supposedly such bars, quite heavy, would enable Spartans to strengthen their arms in making purchases. A handful of these spits (obloi) would be a drax (drachma). A good story worthy of a Herodotus.

 

Sparta used iron spits. See this CoinWeek article by Mike Markowitz. You may decide yourself if these obols are "coins" or "odd and curious money". I saw some in a museum once; don't remember which museum. The spits I saw were not assuredly money -- they were not found in a treasury and could have been iron lamb kebab skewers for all anyone knows.

Here is a legit iron coin from Ancient Greece (not mine!)

Arkadia, Tegea, 423-350 BC? (Köhler, “Peloponnesisches Eisengeld”, Mittheilungen des Deutschen Archaeologischen Institutes in Athen vol. 7 (1882), p. 2 = Traité pl. 227 #20) Iron 10.02g. Obv: gorgoneion, rev: owl.

John D. Mac Isaac mentions the iron coins of Tegea and a few other mints (“Philiasian Bronze”, ANS Museum Notes v. 33 (1988), p. 48-9). I will quote the relevant paragraph completely:

“The virtually unknown iron series of Phlius could be a key to the interpretation of the Phliasian bronze chronology, but there is little evidence about its function or date. Fewer than two dozen examples of this numismatic oddity are known, issues assigned to Argos, Tegea, and Heraea, as well as Phlius. Only one specimen, now in the National Numismatic Museum at Athens, derives from an archaeological context. Scholars are agreed that these pieces are genuine, but on little else about them. One school holds that these issues are one of the descendants of an archaic Peloponnesian iron money, preserved elsewhere only by the Spartan iron spit “obols.” This view sees the iron series as the immediate precursor of the regular bronze coinage, datable to 425-400. The other main opinion is that these coins are not a fractional series at all, but siege money or money of necessity. It is thought that they would have been struck, like the bronze tetradrachms of Athens, during a period of extreme financial distress and represent silver denominations. The period to which they are assigned is 370-350 BC when, it is felt, all of the issuing states were experiencing difficult times. At the present time it is not possible to judge between these proposals, and we must await better archaeological contexts to decide the matter.”

 

Although iron/cobalt content in the alloy is probably low, i can tell from experience that quite a lot of northern-India region "bronze" coins (Indo-Greek, Kushan upto Sultans of Delhi) are clearly attracted by a magnet.

 

Better to stick to gold/ silver/ copper for coinage. Iron for weapons of war.

 

John Gardner, in his novel The Wreckage of Agathon, had this to say about the iron currency of Sparta, introduced by King Lykourgos.

This is Agathon, a seer who has gone quite mad in old age, in the King's service, speaking:

"He outlawed wealth. First, he redistributed the land, splitting all Lakonia into thirty thousand equal shares and Sparta itself into nine thousand, with provision for yearly review and redistribution. Of those who fought him, some stood trial for treason, some merely vanished. Nevertheless, men still had money, and Lykourgos knew from his travels in Asia, especially Sardis, that treasure hoards, like land, mean inequality. Finding that it would be dangerous to go about seizing men's gold openly, Lykourgos took another course and defeated greed by a stratagem; he commanded that all gold and silver should be called in to be reminted and standardized. When the money came in - you remember the story - he returned it not in gold or silver but in iron bars, the coin of the ancients, before Asian influence. A great weight and quantity of the stuff was of very little worth: to lay up, say, three thousand dollars' worth required at least a large shed. Thus he closed out several vices at once. Who would rob a man of such coin? Who would even accept as a bribe a thing by no means easy to hide, a thing not a great credit to possess, or of any worth cut in pieces? Moreover, it was ugly. When it was red hot they quenched it in vinegar and spoiled it: it couldn't be worked."

 

So, basically fiat currency?!

 

This is a work of fiction, but I am not sure if it could be called "fiat" in the sense that iron is a commodity, unlike the printed currencies of today, which are backed by national or regional economies and not commodities such as silver or gold. The point that Agathon makes is that Lykourgos, in his efforts to eliminate economic classes in Sparta, replaced metals of high value, with iron, a very low value metal that was extremely inconvenient, intentionally, to use. At the same time, though, there was a strict social structure in Sparta, with the Spartans at the top and the Helots serving as virtual slaves.

Now I don't know of any surviving examples of this money, but apparently it did exist according to some, or it was a myth, according to others.

 

If I recall correctly Iron was actually expensive back then.

I remember reading that in Rome iron nails were used for crucifying people and then taken out and re-used again due to limited iron.

 

According to the Wikipedia article on Spartan black soup every Spartan paid ten obols a month to their unit in order to buy the raw ingredients for black soup which they would gather and eat together once a month.

So they must have had money if they paid in obols.

They couldn’t be iron obols because they would be paying for someone’s animal to slaughter and they would need fair compensation. 10 iron obols is definitely not enough to replace a pig. 10 silver obols would. At least a piglet. Which is what they bought.

 

Can anyone find a picture of a Spartan iron obol rod in a museum?

I found two semi-contradictory quotes in Barclay Head's Historia Numorum (1911).

"Of the traditional iron money of Sparta no specimens have come down to us..." p. 434.

[Discussing Argos] "It is probable that down to the age of Pheidon, king of Argos, iron was the principal medium of exchange throughout Peloponnesus in the form of spits, οβελισκοι, and that the statement of Aristotle (Fr. 481), that Pheidon dedicated specimens of these οβελισκοι in the Heraeum, is worthy of credit. Whether he dedicated them as official standards for regulating the exact weights of the uncoined currency of his own time, as Reinach ingeniously suggests (L'hist. par les monnaies, p. 35 ff.), or whether he dedicated them to the goddess merely as specimens of the obsolete currency superseded by stamped lumps of silver, said to have been introduced by him into Peloponnesus in connexion with his reform of weights and measures, is a doubtful point. It is noteworthy, however, that a bundle of these iron οβελισκοι has actually been discovered on the site of the Heraeum (Waldstein, Heraeum, I. pp. 63, 177). In any case it would seem that even after the introduction of silver coins into Peloponnesus iron continued to be used as money, and that it was occasionally cast (not struck) in the form of coins." p. 438.

 

All I can find is a Tetradrachm of Sparta. Late 3rd century BC.