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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Ed Snible, post: 8203186, member: 82322&quot;]Sparta used iron spits.&nbsp; See <a href="https://coinweek.com/ancient-coins/ancient-spartan-coins/" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://coinweek.com/ancient-coins/ancient-spartan-coins/" rel="nofollow">this CoinWeek article</a> by Mike Markowitz.&nbsp; You may decide yourself if these obols are &quot;coins&quot; or &quot;odd and curious money&quot;.&nbsp; I saw some in a museum once; don&#039;t remember which museum.&nbsp; 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.</p><p><br /></p><p>Here is a legit iron coin from Ancient Greece (not mine!)</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1437773[/ATTACH]</p><p><b>Arkadia, Tegea</b>, 423-350 BC? (Köhler, “Peloponnesisches Eisengeld”, <i>Mittheilungen des Deutschen Archaeologischen Institutes in Athen</i> vol. 7 (1882), p. 2 = <i>Traité </i>pl. 227 #20) Iron 10.02g. Obv: gorgoneion, rev: owl.</p><p><br /></p><p>John D. Mac Isaac mentions the iron coins of Tegea and a few other mints (“Philiasian Bronze”, <i>ANS Museum Notes</i> v. 33 (1988), p. 48-9).&nbsp; I will quote the relevant paragraph completely:</p><p><br /></p><p>“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.”[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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