I probably don't know enough about Sparta then. From what I thought I knew before your comments, I learned that they took the "teach kids to be fighters" to the extreme and they had the longest "education" period of any city states around them, mostly focused on skills for battle. Supposedly the old men were involved in this education, the kids were training, the men were fighting, and the women were supporting all of this. So that's what I was basing the thought of this type of society probably making it less likely that you have a bunch of scribes or other types of jobs being done that would be more likely to leave stuff written down.