It has been over 40 years since I read the Iliad. Does Homer ever give any time frame for the war? I know he was proven correct in his location of ancient Troy.
Eratosthenes was the first to try to fix historical dates.
To make it clearer, our current system is based on Dionysius Exyguus, who fixed the date of Christ’s birth to the foundation of the city of Rome.
This followed up the Roman attempts to fix the date of the foundation of Rome to the emperor augustus.
This is very significant because if Eratosthenes is wrong, then all our date fixes to ancient times are wrong as well.
He also missed the part where the beach moved and Troy was left quite a bit inland from where it was earlier imagined.
We just spent a few weeks going through the Indian Epic "Mahabarat" ~ 95 tv shows, each of 45 minutes length.
Here you have a competing Epic called "The Ramayana".
The structures are different, but the characters and content are the same, take place during the same periods of time, and tell the same moral precepts.
Homer's work doesn't have any competition to serve as a validation for the content, but it's probably as "valid" as the Mahabarat or the Ramayana, or probably even the exceedingly long Uzbek national saga.
No doubt the Greeks wanted to make their own civilization seem as old as that of the Egyptians and others in the region. At the same time the "archaeological dark age" has other evidence going for it. All you have to do is check out Icelandic volcanic catastrophes, look for the residue down wind, and next thing you know you have a record for tracing and tracking total economic and social collapses throughout Western Europe, Southern Europe, North Africa, Eastern Mediterranean, and Black Sea civilizations ~ going all the way back to the end of the Ice Age.
Unless this latest thesis jibes with the volcanic record I'm not ready to buy off on it. Greek civilization has to date back further else the Celtic tribes along the rivers leading to the Black Sea would not have been distinguishable from the Greeks in the region, and they would hat have had time to have transported their "civilization" from the Black Sea region to Northern Spain by 700 BCE, and that's really important because if they can't do that, they can't pacify the nearby Basque and transport them to Ireland to become the Celtic Speaking Irish which modern DNA tests prove them to be.
So, maybe not 1400 BCE, but certainly earlier than 900 BCE.
He doesn’t, although there are certain things suggestive of a time frame, such as the use (on both sides) of chariots on the battlefield, helmets and armor descriptions which match artifacts now known to be of Mycenaean Greek manufacture, and (most importantly, IMHO) the list of Troy’s allies.