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Notes -
The indo-european expansion is reasonably well archeologically studied, and physical evidence shows that it involved lots of raping/sexual slavery and destroying of settlements. There are also remains in the southern Levant showing that the conquests of the bible happened more or less similarly to how the bible says they did. Obviously these two topics attract a lot of archeological attention, but Troy was, notably, destroyed in war and filled with human remains in the year calculated by Jerome based off of the bible and Greek mythology, as well.
I don't think anyone actually knows for sure how preexisting oral tradition is to the actual writing of the Trojan cycle. We can, however, be pretty sure on the basis of archaicisms in the Greek that it wasn't written from scratch by Homer.
https://infogalactic.com/info/Story_of_Sinuhe
So I misremembered- he didn't join the indo-europeans. Just a random tribe in Canaan. And it was probably fictionalized but discussing very real behavior. So yes, weaker evidence than I thought it was, but still directionally correct.
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