Okay, that last is a steal from the excellent Book of Sequels from the National Lampoon authors. Just like the title to this post is referencing TVTropes and the alternate W.W.II stories with Stormtroopers flying around on rocket packs. (An even more obscure option, for you fans of Ancient Greek Playwrights, might be "Seven Against Atlantis.")
Yeah, this one intersects with a lot of memes, and the basic idea goes way back. You want bronze-age heroes going after a high-tech civilization with nothing but their wits and a sword? Let me introduce you to the Italian Hercules movies.
Right, let me step back a moment for the elevator pitch: "Homer's Hellenes go up against Donnelly's Atlantis."
That is, a coalition of relatively realistic late bronze age warrior chiefs are forced into a battle for their very existence against a 20th century version of Plato's Atlantis: one with aircraft and ray guns.
Of course I'd just been reading about both the Trojan War, and on the history and evolution of the Atlantis story. And researching the Sea Peoples, which includes the rather suspect Luwian Hypothesis (not as batshit crazy as Protochronism, or Thracomania...the point of similarity here being the huge and unlikely empires each draws on their maps.)
And also some Steampunk Roman stuff, and been contemplating questions of footprints of technology and the implausibility of most of the Ancient Astronauts nonsense, and, basically, a lot of weird stuff that was floating around ready to get pulled into the mix. And, no, the conflation of Troy and Atlantis isn't exactly new, either. The new take I'm adding is to go full Constructed World with it (not trying in any way to seat it within archaeological plausibility).
In any case, there's a lot of different ways you could go with this. There's real-world examples of numbers versus technology -- Rorke's Drift, Pizarro, Gate Pah -- and you can pick the side you want to root for. Many is the work of fantasy and science fiction where the Evil Empire has the upper hand in both numbers and force multipliers, and the heroes have to do something exceptionally clever (I'm reading a fanfic now which crosses Mass Effect and Half-Life -- more-or-less successfully). At the nadir it's all Ewoks vs. Stormtroopers, and if you can't even Zerg Rush them...
(As a total aside, I like a lot about Rogue One but I think it's biggest failure is that the Star Wars universe is inherently a heroic one. The decks are stacked so far in the Empire's favor the only convincing way to stop them is by being the hero of the story. Casting the tale in grey-vs-grey morality is powerful but it makes their eventual victory unconvincing. The Leia-bot that appears at the end of the film is appropriately out of the Uncanny Valley, because the kind of simplistic heroism she represents doesn't belong in the Rogue One universe.)
Anyhow, my temptation is to go what I call the Baen Books direction. Unable to match the Atlanteans one-on-one, the Hellenes hire Daedalus, start up their own Apollo program, and go about getting their SandalPunk on. This might be extensions of vaguely historical technology -- Greek Fire, early iron, crossbows, whatever -- or reverse-engineering Atlantean Crystal Technology. Either way, by the end of the book history as we know it is shot and the Ancient World is nigh-unrecognizable.
A different take is a variation of the magic v. technology trope, from heroes and demigods and the occasional Circe or Medea vs. the glowing crystal magitek of Atlantis, all the way out to Gods vs. Grey Aliens.
In any case, an important element in my original conception is that this isn't unabashed heroism. The Hellenes are steeped in realpolitik and no-one gets the moral high ground (even if I would't want to go so far as making them historical bronze age warriors; "nasty, brutish, and in short kilts.")
Which is going to be true whether you use historical Mycenaeans and allies (one would really hope Egypt would get involved), Homer's Hellenes (Agamemnon is an opportunist and the wily Odysseus is rather a bastard), or the 10,000 BCE Athenians of Plato (who are basically romanticized Spartans).
And, yeah, you could flip and put the poor final remnants of Atlantis on tiny Thera or something facing the unwashed hordes, but no matter which side you want to side with, it needs to be a more complicated story, with good people and bad people on both (or all!) sides.
Right. All sides. Because as frozen in time as Egypt usually is, under enough threat they will invest in new methods. The Hyksos forced them into adopting the chariot, and they made good with it. And from a writer's point of view, the Egyptian Kingdom with fancy new magitek would be way, way fun to play with.
So what is this Atlantean tech? Connected to this is a question of not how but how not. The easiest assumption is the technology is new. Otherwise they'd have conquered the world already. If it is self-limiting (say, only works within the city limits) then they aren't going to conquer anyone. And if this is ancient secrets being rediscovered...well, that just moves the question back in time and thus is no solution.
Anyhow. Assume "glowing crystals" (the typical form from 1960's onward visual representations -- I think Donnelly was the first to say it) is a story-teller's interpretation of something they didn't see first-hand. So...silicates in the form of, say, silicon wafers (aka microelectronics?) Or how about crystal as shape and molecular structure aka carbon-carbon nanomachines.
I'm not fond of either. I rather like the trick from a couple of books; of making one new thing available and the rest is built upon it using essentially bronze-age approaches. When you get right down to it, it's really about power. You have power, you have metallurgy; from copper to bronze to iron to steel is basically about how hot you can get the furnace. From Hero's engine to practical steam power to internal combustion to rocketry is largely, again, about packing potential energy (and being able to handle it!)
If you want flying cars, much less levitating platforms, you are talking power. And that's a Kizinti Lesson waiting to be taught. (Of course, the trick in military applications largely boils down to speed. A candle, a battery, a Mars Bar, a cartridge and a flashlight battery contain roughly the same potential energy, but only the cartridge releases it fast enough to put a bullet downrange. So, yeah; being able to light a street is not the same as being able to light enemy ships on fire -- Archimedes aside).
In any case, given a power source you can manage some pretty crazy tricks with even primitive engineering and materials. So, yeah, I'm leaning towards some sort of cold fusion or super-piezoelectricity or something.
The thing from the last couple decades has been information technology. Which in many applications is about making do with less. You can design weaker structures because you can calculate the margins closer. You can extract more information from cheaper sensors. You can tolerate lack of tolerances because you are employing automatic correction. Hard to figure out how to leverage this onto Bronze Age technology, though.
Oh, but then there's sciences of the mind. Biologists and psychologists probably feel the same way physicists do when "quantum" gets thrown around to excuse everything, but to someone without a lot of background in the appropriate sciences it doesn't feel at all like rubber science to have some method -- a technology, a drug, an operation, a stray meme -- that allows Big Brother levels of social control.
Because if you can control minds, you've got the Zerg rush.
If a Ye Olde Egyptian, or sword-and-sandal Hercules, comes into a modern building, what do they notice? "Tile floors, nice. Walls, ceilings ... very well done. Shelves with ... paper things, you must be rich. Hinges, water faucets, okay, I can understand what those are, but more sign of your richness. Oooh, shining and glowing crystal things -- on the ceiling for room lighting, on your desk for showing pictures ... and these windows, is that glass or something else?" I see a quote about glass: " the first glass vessels were made about 1500BC in Egypt and Mesopotamia. For the next 300 years, the glass industry was increased rapidly and then declined. In Mesopotamia it was revived in the 700BC and in Egypt in the 500’s BC." Would Hercules even know what glass was? An Egyptian might, but they didn't have glass-blowing till about 100 BC.
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