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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Ed Snible, post: 8204448, member: 82322&quot;]Can anyone find a picture of a Spartan iron obol rod in a museum?</p><p><br /></p><p>I found two semi-contradictory quotes in Barclay Head&#039;s <i>Historia Numorum</i> (1911).</p><p><br /></p><p>&quot;Of the traditional iron money of Sparta no specimens have come down to us...&quot; <a href="http://snible.org/coins/hn/peloponnesus.html#434" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://snible.org/coins/hn/peloponnesus.html#434" rel="nofollow">p. 434</a>.</p><p><br /></p><p>[Discussing Argos] &quot;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 (<i>Fr.</i> 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 (<i>L&#039;hist. par les monnaies</i>, p. 35 ff.), or whether he dedicated them to the goddess merely as specimens of the obsolete currency superseded by stamped lumps of silver, said to have been introduced by him into Peloponnesus in connexion with his reform of weights and measures, is a doubtful point.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 <b>a bundle of these iron οβελισκοι has actually been discovered on the site of the Heraeum</b> (Waldstein, <i>Heraeum</i>, 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.&quot; <a href="https://snible.org/coins/hn/peloponnesus.html#438" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://snible.org/coins/hn/peloponnesus.html#438" rel="nofollow">p. 438</a>.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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