Uploaded by MILITARY HISTORY 2015. The Military History of Ancient Sparta and the Vikings. The Spartans were the most effective warriors of the Greek civilisations. In an attempt to permanently suppress their much larger class of slaves, the Spartans devoted themselves exclusively to military training.
The Vikings were remembered by their contemporaries as fierce, pagan raiders who threatened the Christian world.
Sparta starts at 00:10
Sparta, or Lacedaemon, was a prominent city-state in ancient Greece, situated on the banks of the Eurotas River in Laconia, in south-eastern Peloponnese.
Vikings starts at 23:30
The Vikings were seafaring north Germanic people who raided, traded, explored, and settled in wide areas of Europe, Asia, and the North Atlantic islands from the late 8th to the mid-11th centuries.
Much of what we know of ancient history is the history of militaries: their conquests, their movements, and their technological innovations. There are many reasons for this. Kingdoms and empires, the central units of control in the ancient world, could only be maintained through military force. Due to limited agricultural ability, there were relatively few areas that could support large communities, so fighting was common.
Weapons and armor, designed to be sturdy, tended to last longer than other artifacts, and thus a great deal of surviving artifacts recovered tend to fall in this category as they are more likely to survive. Weapons and armor were also mass-produced to a scale that makes them quite plentiful throughout history, and thus more likely to be found in archaeological digs. .