Odysseus: Our age of bronze is collapsing.
Me:
The Late Bronze Age Collapse was possibly a direct consequence of the events in the Iliad-Odyssey! For a long time (far too long IMHBUCO) historians believed the whole thing was entirely bullshit, but it turned out a while back that Troy (called Ilium by the Greeks at the time, hence "Iliad" or "The Song of Ilium") was in fact a very real place! This city in Anatolia (modern turkey) was very much a rival civilization of Greece, and shows right around the beginning of the late bronze age collapse total destruction in ways that match the description in the Iliad. First off I want to preface this by saying that "cause" here is like the guy flicking a cigarette "caused" your house to burn down, the fact that your house was filled with gasoline soaked rags and fireworks are what actually did all the damage. Lots of things "caused" the bronze age collapse, but I believe that this was the triggering incident. So here's the rundown: During much of the bronze age two things were essential, copper and tin, these were how bronze was made obv. Copper was relatively abundant, however tin was hard to get, there were a handful of places which tin was extracted from in the eastern mediterranean (where the seats of power were during the bronze age, like greece, crete, and egypt) which made it a necessity to buy tin from remote sources, the fabled "tin land" or "tin islands" which everyone at the time knew about and knew where they were so obviously they had no reason to write it down which meant for some solid 3000 years no one knew where the hell this "tin land" was. until someone did some chemical analysis on the bronze artifacts recovered and traced the isotopes and makeup to a series of tin deposits in europe, with the most prominent one coming from Cornwall in the united bloody kingdom of all places. That's right the british isles were the number one place to get tin back when doing so would have taken years to get to and from.
as you can see from this lovely map the trade route probably went from Britain, through modern day France, Italy, Sicily, and Greece before it was disseminated through the rest of the bronze age kingdoms. but check that out, Greece was probably the number one buyer and seller of tin in this trade network. They were a sea faring people, many islands among them meant that they had more boats and sailing experience than almost anyone. This would have made them ideal as the merchants who did most of the trading for tin along the tin roads. NOW around this time a series of things happened, notably a volcano called Hekla erupted, this likely caused an 18 year cooling period and would have made growing crops, even in the Mediterranean harder, leading to famine, possibly also causing droughts in Egypt. This of course might have all been survivable had it not been for 2 points. The first point is that almost every major kingdom in the bronze age had mountains, pastures, and remote areas filled with people that the rulers of those kingdoms didn't give one red shit about. Abandoned and treated like garbage these mountain folks very much did not like the people in the low lands. Second, and this is the triggering event here, EVERY SINGLE SHIP AND WORKING AGE MAN IN GREECE WAS SUDDENLY DIVERTED TO FIGHT A TEN YEAR LONG WAR. While this siege was happening Greece probably either stopped or slowed down it's tin trade, a trade which had formed a road and network which was nearly a thousand years old at this point, MANY people depended on that tin trade and it was suddenly disrupted. we never hear about the collapse of those people because they probably didn't build sick temples and have clay pots with naked men wrestling, but there were there and they were people and their lives mattered to them as much as yours does to you. So what do you do when you find yourself the last leg of a trade network with so much tin and no one to sell to? you've traded away crops and valuables for this tin which you were going to sell to the Greeks who seem to have been missing for ten years. Your world is now over, the other legs on the trade network fell apart 3-4-5 years ago. There's only you, your starving family, and a handful of fishing boats. My friend you pack up your family, and you sail to where you know there's food and resources, you sail for Greece. When you arrive you find a series of islands and a peninsula with almost no combat capable men and lots of free (read not nailed down) shit, so you take it, you take ALL OF IT
The mountain folk, people from northern Greece and wide open pastures and basically anyone who didn't like the status quo saw their own chance and attacked at the same time, the net result was a refugee crisis, likely spurred on by people like Odysseys. Something they usually leave out in the movies is that Odysseys raided coastal cities for supplies, cities that had nothing to do with the war. This implies it was such a normal thing to do that he (if he really existed) was almost certainly not the only one doing it during this ten year long war. The refugee crisis would have spread from there, with Greeks landing in Anatolia trying to get help and in desperation consuming everything. The people from the sea who had attacked Greece in the first place would have landed there next, with their hodge podge of weapons and armor that they've been pilfering along the way. Every civilization they landed on would have already been weakened by the years of famine, the lack of proper tools from the decade without good tin trade, and the attack from all sides at their own hill an pasture tribes joined in the fight. They then would become a new wave of refugees to land on the shores of the next place. By the time the waves of sea peoples hit Egypt they had heard what was happening from messengers and prepared. Hiring tribes of mercenaries to defend their borders. They were one of the few civilizations that survived the collapse, though they were severely weakened. Near the end of the collapse, when the raids were becoming less common and things were settling down, they decided that they didn't need to pay some of those mercenary tribes, and a group of them likely split off and went off into the east. Where they met a tribe of people who belonged to a group called the canaanites. Where some mingling happened with one of those tribes some gods were exchanged who would eventually be consolidated into a single god (thanks to some influence from the midians) and would write down a lot of nasty shit about egypt because they got stiffed on a paycheck
so yes Exodus is possibly a direct result of The Iliad. please note that most of what I've typed here is still under my own research and might be mistaken or outdated, research is hard now that demons pollute everything in human knowledge, for example the dorian invasion of greece is hotly debunked racist bullshit that google's AI gladly vomits up, but dorians exist and writing styles changed, and there WAS an invasion and attack by SOMEBODY which just don't know who exactly. Most of the invasions could have been low movement-high energy, like a wave traveling though water, the water isn't really moving all the much, it's displaced and then wiggles back and forth. Every wave of refugees invading might have stopped once they took someone elses land, and those displaced peoples went off to do the same to someone else, hence the wildly changing and varied descriptions of armor, clothes, and hats. also due to the extreme amount of historical influence of Christianity it is very hard to actually get the full origins of the Israelites, however genetic and archeological evidence shows that they were almost certainly a tribe of canaanites and that someone in egypt left and went east towards them, alot of this is speculation. but in history this old and poorly documented, very little isn't speculation.
