Collapsing Waves

I dreamed up a particularly odd solution to the problem of writing an "Atlantis" story that is honest to known history and archaeology. It's basically the Eco Inversion; Atlantis never was, and the cults and treasure hunters and evil mega-corporations looking for it are the real danger. In this inversion, the trite and ordinary background world is that of these too-familiar myths, and the new and exciting discoveries are that of real history.


Back to the Bronze Age below the fold.





Sigh. It is unclear what caused the Bronze Age Collapse. It is also unclear in what way, exactly, it can be said to have collapsed.

Okay, so the Hittite Empire seems to vanish. Except Hittite-speaking people continue to linger on in the archaeological record and there's even eventual Neo-Hittite Kingdoms in various lands. Confusingly, the capital seems to have been abandoned then burned. Still, one doesn't have to look much further than the Assyrians, who had just finished whomping the Babylonians and would grow to be the next superpower in the region.

Presumably Egypt was feeling the pressure from these new neighbors as well -- they'd both created client states and even signed peace treaties to keep from having to spend all their energies defending their borders. They declined from this point on, eventually falling (after a whole bunch of weak Pharaohs mostly named Ramses) into the Third Intermediate Period and never quite recovering.

And Mycenae? There's where it gets really confusing. City centers and fortifications burned and there are indications of fighting. Populations appeared to decline (I've seen a counter-argument to this latter but I didn't find it convincing). Trade seemed to continue but the kinds of goods being made changed, with some completely new forms being introduced.

So you can make an argument for external invasion, for civil war, for revolution, or for drought and plague. The evidence is not strong for any of these, but nor are any of them ruled out. Or, for that matter, are any of them mutually contradictory.

Just to make things totally confused, though, there's linguistic and a very small amount of subsidiary evidence that the late-period "Sea Peoples" included Mycenaeans among their numbers.



I've tried a dozen outlines for the novel by now. Each time I change the itinerary of my characters, I also select a different plausible sequence of the Collapse. Way back when I started, I was looking at a domino world, where drought and crop failures way up around the Black Sea drive the first wave of invaders, knocking Mycenae, Luwians/Arzawa, and so forth into motion in turn. I don't really like that outside invasion model any more. That, and having the characters try to back-track all this, fighting their way across the Aegean and beyond, wasn't working for me.

Alas, every time I get a promising outline going (and a new take on the Collapse), in runs smack into something that would be painfully difficult to research. The latest take started in Knossos to show off the late-stage palatial culture in all its wealth and decadence. But the next logical stop is....Cypress. (Although Mycenae isn't impossible -- it does have the grace of being closer and also on the larger trade routes).

Basically the next step is seeing disintegration of the palatial structure into something like a Warlord era, lesser kings fighting over diminishing resources in a complicated mix of temporary alliances and inevitable betrayals...plus influx of refugees and raiders from elsewhere to really bring the lobster pot to a boil.

Cypress is a natural here because it leads the story into Anatolia, and makes Egypt a plausible final stop, and because the archaeological evidence is that some cities were sacked, some survived, many built fortifications, and the whole island changed hands multiple times (but not necessarily as a unit). The downside is I'd have to be reading primary papers in order to track which cities exactly did what, and what evidence from pottery to genetics might say about who was in them at the time.

Still, I suppose the same game could be played in the Peloponnese. Thing is, this is where we bump into Homer again. I'm toying with the idea that the Mycenae who are attacking the coasts of Anatolia and the Levant and eventually Egypt are the real-life model of the men who boarded a thousand ships towards Troy. But how does this work when the palaces are burning back home? Does Agamemnon make sense as a petty warlord, or do the events of the Trojan War properly belong to the Palatial culture?

I have no idea even where to look to research this. So I'm back into just reading everything I can about LHIIIB/C (that's Late Helladic, aka Mycenae, with the burning of the cities happening during the middle of phase 3.) And I've given up on avoiding it; I'm studying the Greeks (well, mostly the Trojan War, but I'm open to practically anything from the Classic era that sheds a light on the Heroic Age, the time of the Trojan War, and the Greek Dark Ages.)




And oh yeah. We also stop seeing writing when the Collapse hits. Well, sort of. The Egyptians are still writing, but they are increasingly split into numerous competing petty kingdoms with parts even ruled by outsiders...there are moments in the late New Kingdom where they have as many Pharaohs as the fourteenth century had Popes. So they don't have centralized archives.

The Hittites are gone, which is a pity because they and the even more scribally competent Ugarites (who had an actual alphabet) really loved writing. And the Mycenae? Well, the thing is, ancient writing tends towards bookkeeping, not histories or literature. Which was intended to be ephemeral; often the only reason we even know that Patroklos owed Herakles twelve sheep is because someone burned down the whole town and in the process fired the clay tablet their accountant was writing on. The Mycenae, due perhaps to having a really lousy script (Linear B, derived from the Linear A designed to fit the words and structure of Minoan), didn't bother with literature or history or even diplomacy. Not, at least, within their own records.

In any case, whatever else happened to the Mycenaean empire, it stopped having a highly centralized bureaucracy. So no tax records, convenient incidents of arson or no. And thus no writing.