Your analysis is consistent with what we know of the period. The Odyssey is full of references to raids on or from neighboring settlements, for the usual booty and slaves. It must have been a pretty grim time to be alive, but as always, the successors always seem nostalgic for the idealized vision of their freebooting ancestors. I seem to recall reading somewhere that written records actually exist of the Trojan vassals of the Anatolian empires requesting military aid in repelling some of these invaders. And we know that eventually a series of Greek colonies with varying degrees of independece dotted the islands of the Aegean and the coast of modern-day Turkey. This is the area that eventually gave a home to the pre-Socratic philosophers our modern day science owes so much to.

In an era with no international law, or even customs, diplomacy usually involved getting chummy with your neighboring warlords and swapping gifts and marriagable daughters with them to build buffers around your land. Presumably, some of these arrangements may have included mutual defense pacts. A lot of stress is made in the Odyssey about hospitality to passing strangers, probably in an attempt to build alliances and to network with your neighbors, not to mention insurance for a time when you may be on the road yourself and need a friendly place to crash.

This appears to be a form of social organization that predated the Age of Empires, and certainly overlapped with it to some extent. We see similar developments in other cultures in Northern Europe. And when the empires fell, feudalism, which is apparently an extension of this system, seems to take over, as it did in Europe after the Romans, Japan during the Shogunate, and China under the warlords. I've always wondered if our cultural nostalgia for this idealized past (chivlary, knights, castles, maidens, Lords, Ladies and sturdy yeomanry) is really some form of racial memory of this time. When the Empire falls, this seems to be the type of social organization which seems to survive the best.