Invasion of the Cloak Pins

I almost wrote myself into a corner. After a week of despair I was finally able to back off from the impossible task of three full-length books each delving deeply into a different culture of the Late Bronze Age.

The back stories of the characters are going to have to remain largely back-story. But there are some good ideas left from that too-ambitious scheme.

I'm going to start in Akhetaton, with an official scavenging expedition into the ruins of the old city of the heretic Pharaoh. Opening that is with a distant lens on the Egyptian culture and with distant drums (the Amarna Letters have some very interesting mentions of a few of the so-called "Sea Peoples.")

I'll add on characters with small introductory/back story scenes for each until we have the full cast. And my thought was that instead of starting with Wilusa, as the first of the dominos to fall, this particular version of the Trojan War is the climax -- with our cast press-ganged along by the warlords who moved into the power vacuum in Greece following the burning of the palaces, as part of the "Sea Peoples" sweep of invasions.





And it turns out that isn't particularly out of the mainstream of archaeological thinking. The nature and extent of the Late Bronze Age Collapse are as much debated as the possible causes. We may some day look back at the idea of the Sea Peoples (who were never grouped and named as such in period sources) as as much of a relic as the idea of the Dorian Invasions.

That there were raids from the sea is not in question. Nor that there were mass migrations of people. What is in question is who any of them were; for every strong identification we manage to make on one line of evidence, there is counter-evidence. The LBA Collapse is, as has been noted, frequently interpreted to the tenor of the times. In the 1970s it was all about environmental collapse. Now the hot idea is climate change. In the pre-war years it was invasion by outsiders, some claiming the Sea Peoples swept down through Italy or even from as far as the Carpathian Mountains.

In the Cold War years invasion was closer to home; waves of raiders from Greece or from Anatolia, as if entire nations had suddenly decided to go a-Viking.

The thinking these days seems to be something like a perfect storm; earthquake, drought, famine, the complacence of too long between wars, leading to a generalized eruption of violence, piracy, mass migration, cascading displacement, and revolution against the stagnant palace economies. But there is no consensus. There is so little consensus, you can't even call the more outré theories outliers.

Like the Luwian hypothesis. This takes many forms, with the most extreme (and though-provoking) being that Troy and a big chunk of the Western coast is one powerful state, the Luwians, who drive out and all but destroy the neighboring Hittite Empire. Until a coalition of the powerful kings of the various Mycenaean Greeks form to take the battle to them.

Which would be what Homer wrote of. But I think the Luwians are selling themselves short. A powerful evil empire ruling most of the world until proud Athens stands up against them? I think we're talking Plato.




Ah, that's the fun of writing in this period. Of course, any day now could see the uncovering of something that will clarify the whole picture. Or, more likely, cause us to throw away what little we think we're sure of. And I have no guesses as to what is going to be discovered, but if you ask me where, the place that would surprise me least is the ongoing archaeological investigations at Byblos.