In the Part 1, The Aegean and the Trojan War (Chapters 2 to 4), the authors seek to determine the true meaning of those developments which had come into Greek tradition under the name of the Trojan War in the context of the Late Bronze history of Asia minor and the Eastern Mediterranean — so far as that history can be reconstructed on the basis of the Hittite, Greek (Mycenaean) and Egyptian written records.
The Second Chapter, Hittite Evidence on the Achaeans in Anatolia of the 15–13 Centuries B.C., offers an analysis of the Hittite written sources mentioning the land of Aḫḫijawā; the authors see in the latter Mycenaean Greece including its Anatolian territorial possessions. Now that the works of H. Otten, A. Kammenhuber and F. Schachermeyr are available, the earliest of those documents (the so-called «Text Concerning Madduwatas») can be dated back to the end of the 15 century B.C., and the latest records (fragments of the time of Tuthalijas IV) to 1250–1220 B.C. The authors argue that the influence of Aḫḫijawā in Asia Minor was decisively getting stronger in the second half of the 14 century B.C. — after Mursilis II defeated the kingdom of Arzawa that had been the biggest state in the Western Anatolia. The heyday of Aḫḫijawā’s power came in the early 13 century B.C., when Hattusilis III in the «Letter Concerning Tawagalawas» addresses the king of Aḫḫijawā as an equal (if not regarding the latter as a stronger partner) and expresses in humble terms his regret for their contention of late and for the war waged to capture the city of Wiluša. He also names the city of Milawa(n)da (Miletus) in Asia Minor an Achaean possession.
Under the rule of Tuthalijas IV (the second half of the 13 century B.C.) the political picture undergoes major changes. Since that time the king of Aḫḫijawā is expunged from the document listing the «great kings», and the ruler of Milawa(n)da is regarded as a subject of the Hittite king; moreover all the dealings with that ruler are conducted without the prior consent of Aḫḫijawā. It is quite evident that certain developments taking in the Achaean metropolis of the Balkan Peninsula were apt to undermine the Achaean Greeks’ position in Asia Minor. The text KUB XIII, 13 is dated to that epoch. It informs us of the defeat suffered by the king of Aḫḫijawā in the Seha River Country (later Mysia) — this fact exactly corresponds to Greek tradition relating the inauspicious beginning of the Trojan war when invading by mistake Mysia instead of Troad, the Achaeans had been repelled by local population (a «Pseudo-Iliad» of a sort!). Using this evidence, we can correlate historical prototype of the Trojan war with certain crises of Greek history of the second half oft the 13 century B.C.
In Chapter 3, Wiluša-Ilios and Truiša-Troy, the authors follow the example of many scholars in identifying the Hittite period toponyms of Asia Minor — Wiluša and T(a)ruiša — with the Homeric Ilios and Troy. They also support this identification with a number of new arguments. Thus, the book demonstrates that the most important developments in interrelations between the Hittite kingdom and Aḫḫijawā in the late 14 and early 13 centuries B.C. were centred round Wiluša, the city viewed by Achaean kings as almost a part of the Greek world. It must be stressed that the overriding points of those interrelations came to be the extremely strong influence exerted by Aḫḫijawā in the Western Anatolia of the early 13 century B.C., as well as the power vacuum evident there by the end of the century, i.e. by the time of the Trojan war. That political vacuum was primarily due to the crisis suffered by Aḫḫijawā and to the inimical attitude towards the Hittites assumed by the natives of the Western Anatolia. The latter can largely be identified with the tribes referred to by Homer as the allies of Ilios in its struggle against the Achaeans. Besides that, the authors seek to substantiate a supposition that some personae featuring in the Trojan cycle epics — Agamemnon, Alexander/Paris, et al. — could have had their prototypes at a much earlier period of history (at the turn of the 14 and 13 centuries B.C.). By the time of the Trojan war they must have become vague figures of the past whose legendary deeds got later mixed with memories of the crucial epoch of the Mycenaean Greece.
In Chapter 4, The Achaeans, the Sea Peoples and the Heracleidae (The Fall of the Mycenaean Greece and Destruction of Troy), that crisis (the Hittite records imply its actual presence) is connected with the invasion of Greece ca 1240 B.C. by tribes from the northwestern Balkans which put an end to the era of Achaean supremacy. The authors refuse to accept the hypothesis of Schachermeyr and some other scholars, according to which, for several subsequent centuries, Greece was ruled by those northerners. Identifying the invasion in question with the «first coming of the Heracleidae» — Greek tradition dates it to the time of the Trojan war — Gindin and Tsymburski are inclined to give credence to (hat tradition when it informs us of an epidemic which had made the vast majority of the intruders withdraw and return to the north, and of their further unsuccessful attempts to invade Peloponnesus again. Archaeological evidence for the subsequent decades shows the picture of the Greeks’ massive influx into the littoral regions, islands and Asia Minor. The Trojan war which, almost immediately following the crisis in Greece, had destroyed the Troy VIIa is viewed as an attempt of the Mycenaean kings to enhance their prestige by making that massive exodus from Greece look like a solid military enterprise. Invasion of Egypt during the Pharaon Memeptah’s reign became a part of that expedition: the troops of the Sea Peoples were composed mainly of the Achaeans who joined the Western Balkanian forces and Troy’s neighbours, the Tyrsenians — ancestors of the Etruscans (vague memories of that attack against Egypt are to be found in Greek legends which date it to the time immediately after the burning of Troy). In the authors’ opinion, the Achaean migrations of that time were an actual combination of aggression and flight from ancestral homes which was reflected in the Trojan cycle myths resulting in a tangle of heroic and tragic motifs where no triumphant note of the victors can be discerned — that gives us the idea of the doomed Achaean world whose decline ensued after the great war.