The Odyssey (2027): The Post–Trojan War World and the Sea Peoples

작성자: Specta

The Odyssey (2027): The Post–Trojan War World and the Sea Peoples

Back view of a man wearing a Greek helmet

Set for release in 2027, The Odyssey is directed by Christopher Nolan.

The film draws on ancient Greek mythology and is expected to explore an epic narrative of adventure, offering a fresh take on the classic story through Nolan’s characteristic sense of scale and interpretation.

Even based solely on the film’s poster and pre-release footage, the gap between the movie and historical accuracy already appears quite significant.😕

Setting aside the exaggerated portrayal of arms and armor, this era remains one that is nearly mythical due to the scarcity of surviving records. In this respect, viewers themselves face the same limitation: the impossibility of perfectly reconstructing what this world truly looked like.

Have you ever heard of the Sea Peoples?

While The Odyssey has no direct connection to them, it shares the same age of turmoil. The world depicted in The Odyssey overlaps chronologically with the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean, when the Sea Peoples were active, and although the two are not directly linked, they can be understood as narratives shaped by the same historical environment.

It is possible that memories of this era’s chaos and destruction were transformed by contemporaries into tales of monsters, disasters, or the anger of the gods, and later preserved through the writings of historians and literary figures.

**Now, let us briefly examine the historical context before and after the Odyssey.**

The peak of the Mycenaean civilization (c. 1600–1250 BCE)

Palace-centered states such as Mycenae, Pylos, and Tiryns
Use of Linear B script
Extensive Mediterranean trade networks
Formation of a powerful warrior-aristocratic class

Cities such as Troy, Mycenae, Sparta, and Athens are shown here as they existed in the Late Bronze Age, not in their later Classical forms.

The Trojan War was fought not by a unified Greece, but by a loose coalition of Mycenaean palace states such as Mycenae, Pylos, Sparta, Tiryns, and Athens.

The onset of the Bronze Age collapse

Around 1200 BCE
Widespread, near-simultaneous destruction of Mycenaean palaces
Collapse of the Hittite Empire
Breakdown of trade networks and the cessation of bronze production
Possible chains of earthquakes and prolonged drought

A turning point at which the established civilizational order disintegrated.

The appearance of the Sea Peoples in historical records

c. 1200–1150 BCE
Increase in seaborne migration and raiding groups
Attempts to invade the Egyptian coast during the reign of Ramesses III
Destruction of coastal cities and port settlements

A contributing factor that accelerated the broader collapse.

An ancient Greek noble warrior being attacked by Sea People soldiers.

A period of disorder following the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization

Mid-12th century BCE
Complete breakdown of central authority
Disappearance of written records
Fragmentation into small, localized communities
Seafaring and raiding becoming commonplace

The real historical model for the world depicted in the Odyssey.

Depictions of ancient Greek mythology and gods

The Odyssey clearly depicts an unstable world.

The Odyssey clearly depicts an unstable world. The society Odysseus encounters on his journey home is characterized by weak central authority, fragmented communities, the normalization of piracy and raiding, aristocratic power struggles, and uncertain connections with distant regions. These features closely resemble those of the Late Bronze Age collapse in the late 12th century BCE.

However, a key complexity must be considered. Homer is generally thought to have composed the Odyssey around the 8th century BCE, roughly four centuries after the so-called Sea Peoples period. The epic therefore likely represents a mixture of memories and traditions of the distant past, experiences from Homer’s own time during the Greek recovery after the Dark Age, and poetic imagination.

In this sense, the Odyssey captures the essence of a world in which collapse is actively unfolding. Troy, a major center of the Bronze Age world, has just fallen; Odysseus encounters chaos and lawlessness as he drifts across the seas; and upon returning to Ithaca, he finds social order broken down, exemplified by the abuses of the suitors. All of these elements reflect the characteristics of a world in the midst of collapse.

The Sea Peoples active during this period were maritime groups in the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean who repeatedly attacked coastal cities and trade networks through cycles of raiding and migration, delivering a decisive blow to an already collapsing civilizational order.

Ancient Perceptions of the Sea Peoples and Their Mythic Transmission

Ancient Egyptian inscriptions and reliefs depict the Sea Peoples in the following ways.

“No land could stand before them.”

“They moved together with their families.”

This detail is a crucial clue to understanding the nature of the Sea Peoples.
It indicates that they were not merely raiding bands or invading armies.

The Sea Peoples were both a fighting force and a displaced population, compelled to migrate as a result of the collapse of civilization.

In modern terms, they can be understood not as groups who came merely to fight, but as people driven to move because their world was falling apart—carrying everything they had with them.

In ancient records, the Sea Peoples appear as mysterious seaborne intruders who destroyed cities while moving in family groups. Over time, these historical memories were transformed into mythic images—monsters, disasters, and the wrath of the gods. The sea monsters of The Odyssey can thus be seen as a narrative reconstruction of these collective historical memories.

From this perspective, the fantastical elements that appear in Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey should not be judged solely by conventional standards.

The world depicted in The Odyssey is one in which order had already collapsed, written records had disappeared, and human experience could only be conveyed through the language of myth. The chaos and fear of this era were shaped into symbols—monsters, catastrophes, and divine anger—and these memories, transmitted across centuries, ultimately crystallized into epic narrative.

Accordingly, the sea monsters and supernatural events portrayed in the film are not so much subjects to be evaluated for factual accuracy as narrative devices that reveal how people who lived through the collapse of civilization understood and remembered their world.

In any case, one of the most intriguing keywords of this period for me is the Sea Peoples.

The idea that the Sea Peoples were the decisive cause that led the ancient world to collapse is highly exaggerated and not entirely accurate; however, at the time, they were undeniably a terrifying presence.

Over time, these Sea Peoples gradually faded from the historical record. Some of those who successfully settled became the Philistines and later appeared in the biblical narrative. Others were defeated by Egyptian forces, or were gradually absorbed and assimilated into other societies.