No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing Caroline Humphrey, Barter and Economic Disintegration (1985)

Pheidon of Argos

Where the obols, the iron spits six of which made a drachma, a myth or a historical object? How did we get the proof?