Palatable, Palatial, Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

Did some research. I have at least three choices.

First is "just" get the history wrong. Have Knossos looking like any other Mycenaean palatial center right up to the LBA Collapse. On the one hand it feels right; the nearly identical Linear B tablets, the way it is described in Homer, etc.

But on the other hand it isn't hard (once you look for it!) to discover that in the real world the palace was destroyed and abandoned a hundred years earlier. It got argued over from Evan's first chronologies until at least the 70's, but the question was more-or-less hashed out to everyone's satisfaction when the Cretan pottery horizons were re-organized and...anyhow, date was pushed forward to no later than 1350.

Second option is to shift the timeline back. Instead of setting the story in 1190 when the palaces are all crumbling, push back to around the time Knossos was (somewhat mysteriously) destroyed. Which is not too far in time from some of the suggested dates for the "real" Trojan War, being up to 200 years in advance of the collapse of the Mycenaeans. As back as far as say Rameses the Great, which is the time the historical Setne Khemwass was digging for the Book of Thoth, the Hittites are suffering the first major defeat (against the Assyrians) and are on the road to their final destruction, or around the Battle of Khadesh...and, yes, there are already Sea Peoples out there so you don't even lose them.

Third option is to go for history or close to it. Recent investigations have shown that even after 1350 the ruins of the palace continued to be used for administrative purposes. This may not have lasted all the way until 1190 but since there were still administrators (presumably Mycenaean) at Chania it isn't too much of a leap to take. On the downside, this isn't the time of the real Scribe 103 and all those lovely records and the true power grandeur and beauty of the palace. Or a time of peace and apparent stability to contrast what happens later.

But on the flip side; I can see the potential in setting in the ruins of what had been the Minoan center (the rebuilding and modification by the Mycenaeans had never been all-embracing. What finally got abandoned was more Minoan in appearance than Mycenaean. Dolphin frescoes and all). And better yet, as a sort of failed (or failing) state. Or perhaps, from the Egyptian perspective, a rogue state. Where Mycenae still has a Wanax, Knossos stumbles on with a mere Bassillus, their economy down to subsistence levels, no money to rebuild the palace or create defensive walls. The countryside largely wild...except that it also bases the Peleset.

(Although really, a more reasonable theory for the Peleset would be from the much earlier Minoan colonizing period, and based somewhere in the Levant.)