A series of rock shelters in the arid region of Mediterranean Spain (the Spanish Levant) has paintings in red and black. The scenes depicted are quite unlike the true Palaeolithic art of the last ice age. There are a number of scenes of hunters chasing their prey, but perhaps the most fascinating are scenes of what seem to be war dances, honey gathering, ceremonies and nature observations, which give some clue of the character of everyday life. The figures are all blocked in as silhouettes in a single colour. This art was probably painted in the period between the end of the last ice age and the arrival of the first farmers and thus is Mesolithic. See also Alpera. Sparta. A small town in the central Peloponnese, Greece, which in the classical period created the Peloponnesian League and organized the military and financial forces that broke the Athenian empire and subjugated Athens (405 bc). Today’s remains are very sparse, and offer wry fulfilment to Thucydides’ prophecy (Book I) that posterity would never guess at Sparta’s power from the meagre remains of her monuments. Although this site has some Late Helladic IIIB material, Mycenaean Sparta (if there was such a place) must be elsewhere, perhaps at the so-called Menelaion or Amyklaion. For the early development of Sparta, it is perhaps ironic that much of our evidence should come from the Sanctuary of Artemis Ortheia, which was to become the setting for the ritual whipping of Spartan youth. One interpretation of this and similar archaeological evidence suggests that Sparta is not culturally odd much before the 5th century bc, but rather shares in general Greek trends such as, for instance, participating in the overall aesthetic renaissance, welcoming foreign craftsmen and producing her own distinguished artists. At the end of the 6th century bc, however, imports and exports seem to be interrupted — perhaps heralding the Sparta familiar from 5th-century and later literature. These literary sources themselves split two ways: the hostile critic paints a stereotype that reflects the fear felt by many city-states who saw the Spartan military machine as a force arraigned against civilization; while the admirer tends uncritically to exaggerate the perfection and value of her selfimposed rigour. Some of the elements in Spartan society known to us from these records can, it is true, be seen as a conservative retention of tribal features, or as a venial failure to abandon traditional values and adapt; these would be, for example, the retention of a federated village (rather than urban) structure; of iron-bar currency; of rule by two kings, ephors and elders; of privilege by a few blue-blooded Spartans (Spartiatai) though vastly outnumbered by a subject population of serf-like Helots. But other facets, such as the extremist dedication to physical training and the martial arts, the separation of males to live in communal messes, the flogging of youths to inculcate discipline and physical hardness, the suspicion of music and the arts as decadent and corrupting, the castigation of urban building and improvement as wasteful — all of these suggest a doctrinaire commitment to a consciously imposed frame of idealism. Plato, for example, in the Republic, comes near to advocating precisely some of these reforms. The possibility follows that the entire framework, including all the elements categorized as traditional above, was deliberately introduced at the beginning of the 5th century bc as a programme of moral reform, a return to moral values, the whole scheme being justified by reference back to a suitably mythical lawgiver, in this case Lycurgus. The Hellenistic period saw a decline attributable — according to views expressed in antiquity and since — either to a collapse of moral fibre, or as just retribution against barbarism. The early Roman empire saw an unexpected revival, and in the 2nd century ad a weird latter-day re-staging of Sparta’s martial and educational rituals, encouraged by the emperor Septimus Severus. A theatre was built for tourists — a kind of moral voyeurism. The town was finally destroyed by Alaric and the Goths in 395 ad.
The Macmillan dictionary of archaeology, Ruth D. Whitehouse, 1983Copied