The Lycurgean Reform at Sparta

1950 ◽  
Vol 70 ◽  
pp. 42-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. G. L. Hammond
Keyword(s):  
Ninth Century ◽  
Conclusive Evidence ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
New Evidence

Prior to 1918 the so-called Lycurgean reform at Sparta was dated not later than the ninth century B.C. AS Grote aptly said, ‘it would seem, in the absence of better evidence, that a date [about 830–820 B.C.] … is more probable than any epoch either later or earlier’. In 1918 Wilamowitz-Möllendorff published what he considered to be better evidence—a fragmentary poem which was ascribed by him to Tyrtaeus and which was believed to indicate that in the latter part of the seventh century B.C. the Spartan army was still brigaded by the three Dorian tribes, Hylleis, Pamphyloi, and Dymanes. In the light of this new evidence—new, that is, to us but not to the ancient authorities—he and other scholars have shifted the date of the reform by a couple of centuries or more into the late seventh or middle sixth century. The shift of date flouts all the other evidence of the ancient authorities (Tyrtaeus, Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristotle, Plutarch, etc.); in consequence these authorities are held to be mistaken, their manuscripts to be corrupt, their meanings to be other than they appear, or their views to be due to misconceptions which modern scholars can dispel. The result is that the ancient evidence has been severely tousled. The more logical the scholar is, the further he is impelled to discountenance all the other ancient evidence—once he has accepted Wilamowitz-Möllendorff's interpretation of the meaning of the new fragment. In this paper the view is advanced that the ancient authorities are in general sound both in manuscript and in meaning and that the new fragment does not yield the conclusive evidence for a late dating which has been supposed. It should also be noted that two of the supports on which the late dating once rested have been undermined by the re-dating of the archaeological evidence at Sparta and by the realisation that hoplite warfare commenced at Sparta c. 700 B.C. In Part I of the paper the ancient evidence is re-considered and in Part II the general conclusions are stated.

3. Material clues

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-33
Author(s):  
Barbara Graziosi
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Original Audience ◽  
Greek World

‘Material clues’ considers the archaeological evidence for when the Iliad and Odyssey were composed, including Heinrich Schliemann’s quest to find Troy on the basis of clues in the texts. The Iliad and the Odyssey refer to material circumstances not found before the later eighth or early seventh century BCE. They describe a distant, mythical past, but are set in a real and recognisable landscape. No interpretation leads to a single original audience, historical context, or specific political agenda, but earliest quotations from, and references to, Homer in other poets’ work prove that by the late sixth century BCE, the poems were well known throughout the Greek world.

scholarly journals Fragments of Boethius: the reconstruction of the Cotton manuscript of the Alfredian text

2005 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 169-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Irvine
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
English Prose ◽  
King Alfred

‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’: T. S. Eliot's metaphor in The Waste Land evokes the evanescent frailty of human existence and worldly endeavour with a poignancy that the Anglo-Saxons would surely have appreciated. Such a concept lies at the heart of Boethius's De consolatione Philosophiae, and perhaps prompted King Alfred to include this work amongst those which he considered most necessary for all men to know. Written in the early sixth century, Boethius's work was translated from Latin into Old English at the end of the ninth century, possibly by Alfred himself. It survives in two versions, one in prose (probably composed first) and the other in prose and verse, containing versifications of Boethius's Latin metres which had originally been rendered as Old English prose. It is the latter of these versions which will be the focus of my discussion here. Damaged beyond repair by fire and water, the set of fragments which contains this copy will be seen to epitomize the ideas imparted by the work in ways that Alfred could never have envisaged.

Making Gold-Mercury Amalgam: the Evidence for Gilding From Southampton

2008 ◽  
Vol 88 ◽  
pp. 37-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justine Bayley ◽  
Andy Russel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Copper Alloys ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
The Third ◽  
Gold Mercury ◽  
Late Roman

Mercury gilding is a well-known decorative technique that was applied to both silver and a range of copper alloys from the third century AD until the introduction of electroplating in the nineteenth century. The process is well understood but, until recently, there has been no good archaeological evidence for it. Excavations in Southampton have discovered two rather different objects that were used to produce gold-mercury amalgam, the first stage in mercury gilding. One is a block of stone and the other a reused amphora sherd. The stone comes from a ninth-century context, while the amphora sherd's findspot is less well dated: it could have been reused in the late Roman or the Saxon period.

scholarly journals On the Roman-Byzantine adoption of the stirrup once more: a new find from seventh-century Aphrodisias

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Tim Penn ◽  
Ben Russell ◽  
Andrew Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Carpathian Basin ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Asia Minor ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Sources Of Influence

Abstract Archaeological evidence and the text of the Strategikon show that it was only in the late sixth century AD that the Roman-Byzantine military adopted the stirrup. It is now widely argued that the Avars, who settled in the Carpathian basin in the sixth century, played a key role in introducing iron stirrups to the Roman-Byzantine world. However, the evidence to support this assertion is limited. Although hundreds of stirrups have been found in Avar graves in the Carpathian basin, very few stirrups of sixth- or seventh-century date are known from the Roman-Byzantine empire - no more than seven - and only two of these are of definitively Avar type. The text of the Strategikon, sometimes argued to support this Avar source, can be interpreted differently, as indeed can the archaeological evidence. While the debate about the Roman-Byzantine adoption of the stirrup has focused mostly on finds from the Balkans, two early stirrups are known from Asia Minor, from Pergamon and Sardis. This paper presents a third, previously unpublished stirrup, from a seventh-century deposit at Aphrodisias in Caria; this is the first stirrup found in Asia Minor from a datable context. Here we present this find and its context, and use it to reconsider the model of solely Avar stirrup transmission that has dominated scholarship to date. So varied are the early stirrups that multiple sources of influence, Avar and other, and even a degree of experimentation, seem more likely to underpin the Roman-Byzantine adoption of this technology.

The Court Poets of the Welsh Princes

PMLA ◽  
1952 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 511-520
Author(s):  
John J. Parry
Keyword(s):  
Ninth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
Early Date

There is a persistent Welsh tradition, going back to very early times, that there were poets in the sixth century, among whom [A]neirin et Taliessin “in poemate brittannico claruerunt.” To these poets Welsh scholarship has given the name of Cynfeirdd or “Primitive Poets.” Recent research has done much to establish the fact that some of the poems credited to them are genuine productions of the early seventh century, and others, including those centering around the name of Llywarch the Old (Hên), belong to the mid ninth century. There are, however, sceptics who refuse to admit the existence of native poetry at such an early date, and hold that all the poems (except two short ones that were actually written down in the ninth and tenth centuries), belong to a period after the Norman Conquest.

Lifting in early Greek Architecture

1974 ◽  
Vol 94 ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. J. Coulton
Keyword(s):  
Ninth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
History Of Technology ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Theoretical Discussion ◽  
Mechanical Advantage ◽  
Greek Architecture ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Temple

In the standard handbooks on the techniques of Greek architecture, the problem of lifting heavy architectural members is considered mainly in terms of the various cranes and hoists based on compound pulley systems which are described by Vitruvius and Hero of Alexandria. It is assumed that the same basic method was employed also in the Archaic period, and that the use of an earth ramp by Chersiphron to raise the architraves of the temple of Artemis at Ephesos in the mid-sixth century was exceptional. If this is true, it is a matter of some interest in the history of technology. The simple pulley, used not to gain mechanical advantage but just to change the direction of pull, is first known from an Assyrian relief of the ninth century B.C., and may well have been known to the Greeks before they began to build in megalithic masonry in the late seventh century B.C.; but the earliest indisputable evidence for a knowledge of compound pulley systems is in the Mechanical Problems attributed to Aristotle, but more probably written by a member of his school in the early third century B.C. This is a theoretical discussion of a system which was already used by builders, but it is not so certain that practice preceded theory by three centuries or more. It is therefore worth looking again at the evidence for the use of cranes, hoists and pulleys in early Greek building.

The architecture of early shrines and temples

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte R. Potts
Keyword(s):  
Seventh Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Religious Activities ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Religious Buildings ◽  
Religious Rituals ◽  
New Buildings

The architectural transformations of the seventh and early sixth centuries, often described as the change from huts to houses, generated a range of building types that some scholars have associated with particular types of religious activities. Some small buildings with one or two rooms have been interpreted as oikos shrines; some buildings with multiple adjacent rooms are thought to have been venues for ritual banquets; and some courtyard complexes have been cast as political sanctuaries or residences where the inhabitants observed familial cults. The archaeological evidence for religious activities associated with any of these building types, however, is not straightforward. The first part of this chapter examines whether it is possible to identify any preferred plan for structures that sheltered and complemented religious rituals during the seventh and early sixth centuries BC. The second part then contrasts this inquiry with the relatively straightforward identification of religious buildings during and after the sixth century BC permitted by the introduction of a distinctive, religious architectural marker, namely podia. As such this chapter explores the emergence of a formal architectural vocabulary for Etrusco-Italic religious buildings and identifies when and where cult buildings became architecturally differentiated from other structures within settlements. Although the architectural changes of the seventh and early sixth centuries BC in Latium and Etruria are not linear or uniform, it is clear that round, oval, and rectangular huts with wattle-and-daub walls and thatched coverings were gradually replaced by rectangular structures with stone foundations and tiled roofs. From the middle of the seventh century plans of the new buildings were regularized to the point where it is possible to identify three main types. The names of these types, however, vary both within and between different scholarly traditions, with the result that a rectangular, tile-roofed building thought to have a religious function can be variously labelled an oikos shrine, a proto-temple, or a temple, and a more elaborate building may be described as a Breithaus, a casa a vani affiancati, a courtyard building, a palazzo, a regia, or an elite residence.

Early Greek Ships of Two Levels

1958 ◽  
Vol 78 ◽  
pp. 121-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. T. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Eighth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Early Date ◽  
The Third ◽  
Previous Sentence ◽  
Point Of Departure

As the point of departure I take that controversial passage in Thucydides i. 13.2—Now the controversy turns on the type of ship that Ameinocles built. Thucydides uses the general word ναῦς, which in Herodotus certainly and, according to Liddell and Scott, in Greek literature generally does seem to be a synonym for τριέρεις, and after Thucydides' use of the word τριήρεις in the previous sentence it would be natural to take ναῦς in the same sense. The Corinthians built the first triremes in Greece and Ameinocles built four of them for the Samians at the end of the eighth century, and there would be at least a reliable terminus ante quem for the introduction of the trireme into Greece. Here the matter would have rested, had not this date conflicted not only with the other literary records, including Thucydides himself, but also with the archaeological evidence, such as it is, which both seem to preclude such an early date.The marshalling of the literary evidence against the supposition that triremes were built in Greece at the end of the eighth century has been admirably done by Professor Davison in the Classical Quarterly of 1947. He rightly comes to the conclusion that triremes could not have been introduced into Greece before the third quarter of the sixth century, and that in the disputed passage Thucydides was using ναῦς of ships generally and refraining from specifying the class; but in this case how flat the second part of the sentence sounds—the Corinthians were the first in Greece to use triremes, and Ameinocles the Corinthian built four ships of some sort or other for the Samians—nor does it seem to warrant the luxury of a precise date; and why four ships?

Knossos: the Archaic gap

1999 ◽  
Vol 94 ◽  
pp. 289-307 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. N. Coldstream ◽  
G. L. Huxley
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Early Iron Age ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Full Stop ◽  
Deep Recession

This article explores in detail the mysterious lacuna in the record of Knossos during the sixth century BC, between the abandonment of the collective tombs of the Early Iron Age and the revival of the city's fortunes in Classial times. The archaeological evidence, indicating a deep recession, is marshalled in three chronological sections: (i) the full stop in the seventh century, (ii) the Archaic gap, and (iii) recovery in the fifth century. Parallel developments at Amnisos are also discussed. In the light of any relevant clues from the written record, we evaluate the likelihood of various possible causes of the sixth-century recession at Knossos, whether natural or human.

The living and their dead in Classical Athens: new evidence from Acharnai, Halai Aixonidai & Phaleron

2017 ◽  
Vol 63 ◽  
pp. 151-166
Author(s):  
Chryssanthi Papadopoulou
Keyword(s):  
Settlement Pattern ◽  
The Other ◽  
Large Area ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
New Evidence

The deme of Acharnai belonged to the Oineis tribe and was the largest deme in Attica, represented in the boule by 22 bouleutai (Trail 1975: 65; Osborne 1985: 44; Platonos 2013: 137). Acharnai not only had a larger population than the other Attic demes, but it also appears to have extended over a particularly large area: over Neapoli, Agios Athanasios, the centre of modern Menidi, Lathea, Auliza, Pyrgouthi, Agia Anna, Charaugi, Kokkinos Mylos, Agia Soteira, Loutro, part of Gerovouno and possibly northern Lykotrypa (Fig. 125).Both Maria Platonos (2013: 139; 2004: 31–32) and Danielle Kellogg (2013: 10–26), who have studied this deme in depth, agree that there would have been more than one settlement within its limits. Kellogg (2013: 32–33) also notes that the settlement pattern in most areas would have been scattered: that is, there would have been numerous farmsteads dotted across the landscape. This is a very attractive suggestion, since Acharnai was known for its fertile fields, and it is supported by the archaeological evidence, since numerous Classical walls delimiting properties have been excavated in the broader area of the SKA Rail Centre (ID4852; Platonos 2004: 430).

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