Spartan steel

[PMBardunias]

I had come across reference to an old Newsweek article about metallurgical analysis of Spartan iron money. I brought this up on a Archaeo-metallurgical forum and someone found this link. I don't know how much is true, but it is certainly worth a read.

http://www.metrum.org/measures/castiron.htm

[Kineas]

Super article! Thanks

[Endre Fodstad]

That sounds really far fetched. There are also a few things which metallurgically don't make sense. Quenching cast iron? What would be the point of that in this context? Everything but the wrought iron discarded from the bloom (the bloom was typically sorted, with the high-carbon Fe-C (steel) being seperated from the low-carbon Fe-C (wrought iron) and the too-high carbon Fe-C (cast iron plus a lot of impurities) being discarded or thrown back into the furnace)? I might have misunderstood him, of course...or the greeks would use a different bloom handling process than I am used to from the later periods I am more familiar with.

It is one of those creative hypothesii that are difficult to either prove or disprove, based as they are primarily on the interpretation of written evidence that could go either way with nothing more to back them up. It is not impossible that a process for the decarburization of the better slag/cast iron parts of the bloom could have appeared this early and then, apparently, been forgotten, but the article as it stands is mostly speculation.