A couple more rants on writing historical fiction first. Say someone figures out my Cretan weaver has a glimpse into the future. They can't call her a sibyl. Or a Cassandra. Probably! I mean, the term "sibyl" is documented from before Tarquinus purchased the surviving Sibylline Books. And Pythias goes back before that, too. It seems rather more likely the term was indigenous, like "Homer," before being appropriated for a later myth. And although there's several hundred years and a Dark Age to go before the Illiad, stories of Cassandra might have entered the oral tradition at any time prior (possibly prior to the semi-historical event she later gets attached to).
I'm also snarking that the Pythias might be one of the first documented cases of mansplaining. Women were the seers with a vision of the future, but war and conquest and profits are serious business, much too serious for a mere woman to understand. So everything the prophetess saw would have to be properly explained by a male handler. In honesty, though, how things were conducted at Delphi are unclear; the Pythias may have spoken for herself -- the whole story of the magic smoke seems to have been made up whole-cloth and doesn't occur in accounts from writers who were actually there.
Still, it is an ongoing problem I'm having with terms that exist in classical Greek. I could probably manipulate them to something that fits the orthography of Mycenaean Greek, but I don't see that helping. At best it slows the reader while they digest the unfamiliar, at worst it looks like I'm trying to be clever for clever's sake.
But what do you do? I was imagining a conversation (relating to the supervisory positions indicated in the Linear B records of textile workgroups) and the term "meritocracy" came up. Which to me is too obviously originating among the political thinkers and philosophers of Classical Greece, and something that is going to be making the reader stop and ask, "Did they have that yet?"
Well, I'm pretty sure the concept wasn't invented in Athens. There were certainly bronze age situations where it would have come up. Sorry, professors; you can think the thought without having to have the (later, Greek) term.
In any case, it is part and parcel of the Coconut Effect problem. And as I'm reviewing the history of the "Restorations" (or as Evans put it, "Reconstitutions") of Knossos and associated Minoan art and sculpture, I'm reminded forcefully that much of what the casual reader "knows" about the Minoans is unsupported and deeply suspect. (And, yes, one should see the Mycenaeans as a continuation and adaption of Minoan culture -- one with a more pronounced warrior slant, among other changes, but one that has a continuity of evolution from the earlier culture).
It is a difficult choice the writer or other creator has to make. Sometimes you fight the battles you can win; in Assassins Creed Origins, set in Ptolemaic era Egypt, the Pyramids are properly clad in their shining white complete with the gold cap on Cheops, and the buildings are painted. The statuary, however, is still an ahistorical marble-white. With this, I have to agree with them. Whether or not the player would accept the historical painted statues, even whether painted or unpainted is aesthetically more pleasing to the modern eye, in the end it is a fighting game and having what looked like a bunch more NPCs standing around the area would be visually confusing.
I'm making the same choice. I'm hitting the books to try to figure out which part of the Palace of Knossos are still standing at the time of the novel, but in the end I need material, I need material which is colorful and detailed and I'll take the reconstitutions of Evans' hired artists. And that the reader will probably have encountered the Dolphin "fresco" (almost certainly a floor decoration, historically) is only a bonus.
(The Coconut Effect is a phrase popularized on TVTropes, specifically referring to the way coconut halves were used to represent the sound of horse hooves for decades until audiences were finally trained to accept something more realistic.)
So back to migration patterns.
Allow for the moment the idea of a flow of invasion that is roughly North to South, starting in Greece, moving to or joining a wave starting from around the Bosphorus and moving sequentially down through Anatolia and the Levant before finally crashing into Egypt. Don't worry who is invading; that's a later problem.
So I start in Crete (and in simultaneous/back story, in Amarna) late in the rule of Merneptah or early in the reign of Rameses III. A time of growing tension but still generally peaceful. The coming-of-age story, the Weaver's Hall and saffron-gathering on the hills and all that, and a soft revolution that is more Summer of Love than Storming the Bastille. These chapters bring the clock forward, in stages, a decade or more; Kes is at least young teen when the dominos start.
First the Palace of Knossos is burned. But here's the thing; the archaeological burn layers of many of the sites cited aren't necessarily markers of change in occupation. Hattusha gives evidence of having been quietly evacuated years before. Occupation signs are present on top of burn layers in many palatial centers. So Mycenaean rule and some overall structure remains in Crete even though the palace is damaged and the population is migrating into the interior and the mountains.
Our characters leave Crete to discover cities on the Greek Mainland already destroyed. They head across the Aegean (possibly not by choice) and meet the third member of the party in Miletus -- which he has has finally reached in his long struggle back from Willusa. They head down the coast and pick up the fourth and final member of the party (depending on how you count Paneb) at Byblos and set sail for Ugarit -- arriving just in time for the final days of that city. They flee towards Egypt and there is some political skullduggery towards what will eventually be Rameses III's triumph at the Battle of the Delta.
And that's a plan. It tells me more-or-less what will be happening in two books or more, and tells me which places are going to need research.
It does leave undecided what exactly is happening in Crete, who the Black Ships are, what connections the Sea People have to all this, etc. There are some intriguing ideas, however. There's the Sherdana, who despite fighting on both sides at the Battle of Kadesh and the Battle of the Delta, may be largely mysterious to the insular Egyptians. Hence good reason for my Egyptian nobleman to be peering into the Amarna Letters and getting concerned.
And then there's the suggestion that some of the Sea Peoples may have originated on Crete. Unfortunately not the Sherdana -- that would be too convenient.
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