Istorii

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   Beyond Helen, Troy sat at the mouth of the Hellespont, between the Mycenaean world and the Hittite empire; control of the strait and its trade explains a ten-year war better than an abduction.

   Istorii · -430

   Whoever holds the strait holds the price of everything that passes through it.

   Hisarlik, the hill identified with Troy, sits at the entrance to the Hellespont (Dardanelles), the strait leading from the Aegean into the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea. Northerly winds and the current make the passage hard; ships waited for weeks in the bay below the citadel, and whoever held the bay could tax, host or block them. Grain, horses, metals and slaves from the north came through that corridor. Troy VI, the city with sloping walls and towers, is rich precisely because of its position. Hittite tablets from Hattusa name a kingdom of Wilusa — probably (W)Ilios, Ilion — a vassal of the Hittite great king, with a surviving treaty (Alaksandu of Wilusa, thirteenth century BC). The same archives mention Ahhiyawa, a power from over the sea with which the Hittites had friction in western Anatolia — almost certainly the Achaeans. The Trojan War thus becomes plausible as one episode in a long rivalry between the Mycenaean world and the Hittite sphere over the Anatolian coast and its strait. Today's parallel: straits remain causes of war. The Bosphorus, Hormuz, Malacca, Bab el-Mandeb — whoever controls a chokepoint controls the price of everything that passes through it. Croesus, in Herodotus, states the simple truth: no one prefers war; but when the strait is at stake, "no one" quickly becomes "almost everyone".

   “No one is so foolish as to prefer war to peace, in which, instead of sons burying their fathers, fathers bury their sons.”

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