A Total War Saga: TROY - Any Thoughts?

[Gusington]

 ;D

[MengJiao]

Sounds like you're suggesting it was man-made catastrophe like a massive ancient world war.

  I suspect it was something like -- little quasi-empires (eg, Troy or the Myceneans or the Hittites) were economically running very well and stuff was accumulating, the trade networks growing everything running well even with volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, when somebody noticed that these little peripheral regimes were actually really vulnerable and they had lots of stuff and not that many warriors.
Once somebody knocked off a big fortified citadel or two, there was a 100-year free-for-all that brought in more and more plundering forces (they wouldn't have to be big or even have regional bases) and everything that was not adequately defended (apparently The Egyptians and Assyrians and maybe the Athenians and Phoenicians (unless they were more on the plundering side)) got plundered and the plunder went into accumulating more plunderers in a ever-spiraling downward spiral of spiraling more and more out of control.  Well, once everything is plundered...what then?  Even the plundering has to stop.  You have a "Dark Age" (due to the collapse of trade and the dispersal of populations and the disgust of plunderers) that lasts from say 1150 to 950 before things start to recover.  So not a world war, but probably plundering run amok and not necessarily by incoming raiders but possibly by internally-generated opportunistic factions.

The Athenian case is very weird -- there are Mycenean remains there, but apparently they held on and were never abandoned, though the recovery bypassed Athens at least to start with.  Euboea is the first area of Greece to come drifting up out of the Dark Age.

[MengJiao]

I didn't know you were an archeologist, Indy.  That's pretty freaking cool.

  Well...just in grad school and I gave up without a MA or anything.  I ended up making computer models (the first ones were Archaeological in grad school) and that's been reasonably fun, though a bad day in archaeology probably beats a good day in computer modeling.

[Gusington]

I have at least heard of the Greek dark ages. Probably caused by aliens dressed as Zoroaster or something :)