Half way through the massive book of analysis of some of the Linear B archives. Bunch of other papers to read, prime among them an argument that depictions in The Odyssey can illuminate coastal raiders in the LBA, in particular those by the Sherdana.
I think I'm kicking my timeline back. The subject is both more complex and more contentious but basically the wave of destructions (for which, in an earlier age, the Sea People were often blamed) occur around the middle of the 13th century. This is apparently when the records at Pylos were baked in the destructive fires. It is also closer to the most likely historical analogs of the Trojan War.
Actually, I've got a pet theory. Just as I'm borrowing some names from the Pylos archives and moving them to Knossos, I think Homer may have borrowed Alexandros and Piyamarados (err...Priam) from the Hittite records, displacing them in time and changing some details to make a better story.
(The final wave which sweeps down along the coast and dashes itself against Egyptian shores is roughly 1190 too 1170 BCE, or some fifty years later).
I think I want to start after the Battle of Kadesh, and preferably after the death of Rameses II, but if I were to bracket my choices now I'd say the latest date I'd pick to start the story would be the year Rameses III comes to the throne. (There's two or three Pharaohs in the middle there, BTW. We don't get into the endless Rameses' until later in the Ramesid era).
A big reason is that I'm understanding the changes that happen in the Easter Mediterranean better. By the time Ugarit is sacked there's very little in the way of functional governments anywhere and sea trade has essentially collapsed. I want to tell a story of the storm, and of the coming storm, not of the debris field left after the storm.
I'm also backing away from the slippery slope of modern conception. I really do like the idea of people feeling they are living at the end of the world, and there are ways this is supportable, but they wouldn't and shouldn't construct it as the "Late Bronze Age Collapse" and they certainly won't construct the causes the way we do. Not to call it a simpler time -- it isn't, no time is simpler, just different -- but just as later historians came up with facile explanations that fit the preoccupations of their time, the locals should construct causes that fit their view of the world.
I'm still in a huge ball of fuzz about the relationship between the Mycenae, the Acheans (or whoever actually fought at Wilusa/Troy), the Sea Peoples, the Minoans, the eteocretans/pelasgians, the Dorians v. Ionians/Attic, etc. And folding all that in with whatever is happening on Crete, between the Palace, a Peasant's Revolt, and the Black Ships. Who represents or is connected to what? There are so many potential links, subtle as they are, but no single coherent pattern is coming out of it.
It has been suggested, for instance, that the Dorians are essentially the lower classes and military conscripts, who after central collapse moved out as a colonizing/invading force. Except the language map largely works in the wrong directions and paints in the wrong places. Similar for any connections between named Sea Peoples and any of the Mycenae locations; they sort of work, but then there's a counter-fact to blow it up again.
I'm willing to believe at this point that the evidence is thin enough that you could make convincing argument for just about anything. If that is so, though, I still have a big problem; I haven't decided what I want to be saying, and what kind of patterns best supports the story logically and dramatically.
All I'm sure of is I'm against the obvious; peaceful Minoans over-run by warlike Mycenae, and rising up to throw off their yoke. Or coalition of Mycenae try to take over a vassal state of the weakening Hittite Empire but end up destroying it. Of course in rejecting what appears to be trite I may be forcing my plot to reach for strained but equally trite alternatives.
And another thing. I've realized there's no-one in my cast who really lives and believes the Homeric Ethos. The situation on Crete is almost in terms of how it contrasts with the society of the mainland, and in any case is told from the point of view of people far down enough in the social scale they aren't forced to grapple with honor the same way Achilles did.
So, sure. I could go back to giving my Athenian-born mercenary more of a story, and let him have a character arc in which he understands, even embraces the code before abandoning it.
However. The whole Achilles in his tent business makes me think of chivalry; specifically, how the epic poems going on and on about knights-errant and courtly love were essentially written in the gunpowder era; long after those modes of behavior could be called descriptive. And, yes, we are well aware Homer was writing in a Greece that was coming out of the Greek Dark Ages, an iron-age world far from the world his poems described. Point I'm making is there's no reason to assume the elaborate Homeric codes of honor are reflective of actual LBA society.
I think Homer gives insight into how things work when it is boiled down to small warrior bands without a unified government. And there are elements that last through into classical society; but again one must be careful, as The Iliad became functionally a bible for the Classical Greeks; it is difficult to untangle where some cultural habit is carried over from history and where it is consciously adopted.
In any case, it amplifies again for me what I want to do with this book. Homer has been done...first by Homer and that's a hard bar to clear. Actual historical Mycenaean society is less explored.
And for all the questions I'm struggling to answer, all the subtle details about how to date the multiple Knossos archives (there appears to have been more than one fire) on so forth, I have to write for an audience who is lucky to have even heard of the Sea People or the LBA Collapse.
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