Historical fiction has the secondary goal of bringing a past period to life. Of giving the reader the impression that they are experiencing a part of the past. The expectation is two-fold, two faces of the same core idea; if it is wrong it shouldn't be obvious about it (or, alternatively, that it has good and justifiable reasons to get it wrong), and it should give the appearance of informing, even educating the reader, with new insights into the period and events in question.
There's not a lot, in short, which is off the table. Readers may -- readers most certainly do -- complain about errors and bias but Mel Gibson's bank account isn't hurting, not at all. (And, yes, that's Hollywood, which has their own escape clause of spectacle, but there is a lot of poor historical fiction out there as well.)
The Aegean Bronze Age has a really big escape clause of its own, and that's Troy. The reverence for The Illiad is such that a writer can get just about everything completely unlike any actual bronze age, as long as they hover within at least distant recognition of Homer's epic. (Or any of the mythological sources that supported hundreds of peplum films and several of Ray Harryhausen's best efforts.)
Which is all a long preamble to where I am now. I've shopping carts full of expensive books of research that would take another couple years to read, but it has become time to stop and make the hard calls and spin a version of the Late Bronze Age that at least looks historically justifiable but, more importantly, can be used to spin a good story.
So here's my ground rules, all strongly defensible from textual and archaeological evidence:
There was a sharp transition in many of the major societies of the Eastern Mediterranean but there was not a single cause, a single event, nor a single process. Different empires transitioned into the Greek Dark Ages in different ways, and for a different mix of reasons.
The Mycenaeans do not have a single strong central organization. Nor is palatial control all-embracing; there are at the least industries outside of palace control, and very possibly a splintered bureaucracy without a strong center. The Mycenae are inheritors of the Minoan culture and there are enough similarities to call it a continuation.
Crete is a multi-ethnic, polyglot society. Not all parts of the island are under central control.
The Sea Peoples come together in a coalition at least once but are otherwise disparate, with no central organization, no single origin, perhaps not even significant similarities.
Outsiders to the Mediterranean have their parts to play, but there is not an overall pattern of outside invasion kicking off the final collapse.
And where I'm thinking of going with it? I still love the concept of Sea Peoples, even if this shows up only as a way to look at a single cultural group with a more specific and documentable history. And I still love the concept of a three or four way fight in Turkey, regardless of whether the Towers of Illios are topless a generation (and a Hisarlik archaeological layer) earlier.
But I'm starting on Crete. And that means defining something that I can go forward with. And here it is; the aftermath of revolution. A tragedy of the commons, you might say. A bronze-age version of Fallout 4. Climate shift, populations grown too large to be sustainable. Drought and famine. On the heels of an earthquake storm (and possibly the Hekla 3 eruption -- why not?) the palatial centers are becoming more centralized behind ever-growing cyclopean walls.
I am painting these bureaucracies as benevolent despots. Exercised no doubt by self-interest, but still; the centralized control and irrigation and coastal defense projects is what makes it possible for the people to survive. And as the drought ends, they are even showing signs of possibly turning the corner.
Except it is always easier to take than to build. So piracy and raiding and warfare between the primitive city-states is increasing in a deadly spiral; the more people turn to arms as a way of surviving, the less agriculture there is to go around in the first place.
This puts of course the most pressure on the people, who revolt both passively (immigrating out of the field of influence of the larger palatial states) and actively. Abetted by the military in that usual conundrum of needing to pay the people who you've hired to loot everyone else lest they add you to the list.
This is on the ground largely orthogonal to the ethnic/linguistic patterns worried over by so many, but as the majority population on Crete is more etocretan than Mycenaean, you can sort of map this on to one of the versions of the Dorian Invasion phantasm. Or in little words, the peasants are revolting, the military stages a coup, then the military takes to ships to grow their own power with flocks of civilians in leaky boats trailing behind hoping to find a better world.
And in the process destroying any real hope of recovery (certainly not of the wide-spun trade and tightly organized industry of the palatial period).
And yes, yes, I can defend some of this, at least with a certain glibness. Oxcarts full of women and children in the Medinet Habu inscriptions, etc. etc. What would be hard to defend is that the motion starts in Crete. Almost certainly, the mainland has problems first, and Crete is caught in the conflagration.
Which is fine. It works just great for the story like that.
(I'm currently tracking down a thought...the Ekwesh, who may have been the Achaeans aka mainland Greeks, making up a mainstay of the later Sea People's incursions, and the rather more complicated story of the Peleset, who may be both Philistines and Cretans. Not as much fun in some ways as the Sherden, who had a long association with Egypt -- fighting in the Battle of Kadesh, the Pharoah's private bodyguard, etc. -- but have potential as a vague sense of happy ending in that after all of the fighting Rameses III settles them in.........Palestine. Well, nobody said it was happily ever after.)
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