About 3,300 years ago, in the region around the Mediterranean, civilization collapsed. That’s what the archaeological record shows: the spectacular disappearance of a number of thriving cultures in Greece, Anatolia, and the Middle East. The Minoan palaces, with their astonishing frescoes of acrobats jumping over bulls, fell into ruins. Cyprus, at the crossroads of late Bronze Age culture, suffered a series of devastating attacks. Powerful Egypt was hobbled.

Perhaps the most famous destruction, however, took place at the city of Troy, which was part of the Hittite empire that stretched across modern-day Turkey. The fall of Troy is, of course, the subject of the two great works of ancient Greek poetry: the Iliad and the Odyssey. Composed sometime between 725 and 675 BC, or nearly half a millennium after the events they describe, the works attributed to the blind poet Homer recount the decade-long Greek siege of Troy, the clever ploy developed by Odysseus to smuggle soldiers into the city by way of a “gift” of a massive wooden horse, and then the 10-year journey of Odysseus back to his wife and child in Ithaca.

What the books do not detail is what ultimately happened to the conquerors after the sack of Troy. The Mycenaean civilization—the disparate Greek city-states that united at the end of the Bronze Age to sail against Troy in the Iliad—suffered the same fate as the great city of Priam and Hector. Athens, Thebes, Pylos: they all became rubble. It was only in Homer’s time that Greece was able to make a comeback.

The culprits responsible for the collapse of Troy are well-known. But what about the other civilizations? Inscriptions from late Bronze Age Egypt mention a mysterious “sea people” marauding through the region and destroying the great cities of Hatti, Ugarit, and Ascalon. The people of the sea very nearly bring down the Egyptians as well but are defeated in two epic battles. Weakened by war and other factors, Egypt goes into decline.

These “sea people” figure prominently in Christopher Nolan’s latest film, The Odyssey. As Odysseus........

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