"A. R. Burn in the 1930s had doubted the conventional chronology of ancient Greece, also using the Spartan king list, estimating the end of Mycenaean Greece about 1000 BC but felt compelled to withdraw, given archaeologists’ certainty, but his 1966 swansong The Pelican History of Greece reiterated his doubts. ‘If the dates computed by Greek scholars for the fall of Troy (ranging from 1334 to 1127 with 1183 [BC] the most popular) were approximately correct’, he wrote, ‘it was largely by luck for the genealogies, by which those scholars bridged the Dark Age were “heraldically” linked up with the names of epic heroes and the sons of Helen…Those of the kings of Sparta seem to have enough authentic generations to take us back to about the 9th century [BC] and thence…joined up to their heroic ancestor Herakles and to do it their earlier generations are given the improbably long average lengths of 39 years; Spartan reigns in historic times average about 25…Greek tradition may be perfectly right in saying that in the second generation after the siege of Troy, the heroic dynasties fell.’"