So when nearly every major city in the Western core, from Greece to what we now call the Gaza Strip, went up in flames around 1200 BCE, the aliens would have assumed it was another disruption like 2200 or 1750 BCE—a big one, to be sure, but nothing to worry about in the long term. Even when disaster engulfed the palaces so suddenly that their scribes barely had time to record it, the aliens would lose no sleep.
