I played a little Assassin’s Creed Odyssey again recently and it made me ask myself this question again and I realized I never got a satisfying answer when I googled around before.

In the game they reference “the ancients” and in game you go to some ruins which are clearly inspired by the Mycenaeans. I don’t recall them ever using any specific name to refer to them during the story, however.

I know, I know, it’s a video game. But it made me wonder if we have any references from the Classical Age of the Bronze Age beyond the works of Homer and the like. What did the people of the Classical World think of those who came before them? Did they even know of the civilizations that thrived before them? Is that where we get our stories of cities who defied the gods and were destroyed due to their arrogance? Was that the extent of their knowledge?

It just baffles me that these thriving cultures and civilizations that we know had widespread international trade networks could just be completely forgotten for millennia. There must be some mention of them beyond the epic poems and myth in Classical texts. They would have had some concrete idea of where they came from. Something! Right? Right??