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Homer crammed a lot of stuff into a single war event. Then stretched it out to contain the contents.

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.

Wow.

At the same time the "archaeological dark age" has other evidence going for it.

It doesn't. There's no evidence for the existence of the Greek dark age -- hence the term, "dark age". No artifacts, and most importantly, no strata at all. Structures from classic times were built immediately atop Mycenaean structures.

Unless this latest thesis jibes with the volcanic record I'm not ready to buy off on it.

That makes no sense at all. There isn't any correspondence between world history and the eruption of some Icelandic volcano. An ash layer in the Greenland ice cores was originally saddled on as evidence for the fictional mid-2nd millennium BC eruption of Thera, but was found to match a volcano in Alaska (instead of nearby Iceland). Greenland has been at the fringe of world history for some reason. :')

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 that has bupkis to do with the Trojan War. The Celtic incursion into Greek lands and Anatolia came later than the Trojan War and is well dated.

So, maybe not 1400 BCE, but certainly earlier than 900 BCE.

The Trojan War years correspond to the 25th "Ethiopian" Dynasty of Egypt, so yeah, later than 900 BC. The Phrygians had entered Anatolia, and were allied with Troy, but the Phrygian kingdom only lasted a few generations, then was destroyed by a new wave of various invaders from Asia. That wave also ended the Mycenaean or Heroic Age of Greece.