produce anything special that anyone else wanted. The Minimalists see no
evidence of an east–west trade route running across Anatolia to the
Hellespont and into Europe. Most importantly, they not only deny that the
Mycenaeans went beyond the Hellespont, they don’t believe Troy had any
contact with the Black Sea. Currents and winds effectively prevented Bronze
Age ships from navigating the Hellespont, and they would have found the
Bosporus an even greater challenge. The region around Troy had fertile soil
and lots of water and was good for agriculture, stock raising, andfishing, not
a bad place to live. But Troy was far away from the real action of the urba-
nized, commercialized, civilized world, a backwater rather than a gateway.
As for the Trojans themselves, they were happy in their bucolic bliss, com-
placently pursuing, as the Minimalist scholar Denys Page put it,“what seems
to have been their favorite occupations, spinning wool and eating shellfish.”
So the second Trojan War rages on, which makes it difficult to determine
an answer to the question: why was there a first Trojan War? The
Minimalists deny that the Mycenaeans comprised a hostile coalition deter-
mined to seize control over the Hellespont: why would they want it? And, in
any case, the conflict could not have been a trade war since Troy was hardly
involved in trade. Their best guess is that Troy became mixed up in larger
geopolitical issues involving the Mycenaeans and the Hittite Empire and
ended up as one of the convergence points of a greater war. No one disagrees
that relations between the Mycenaeans and the Hittites were generally sour,
and the Hittites were known to have used trade embargoes as a weapon
against the Mycenaeans in other places. But if so, counter advocates of the
standard interpretation, why would the two neighborhood heavyweights
come to such a third-rate, no-account place tofight it out? Certainly trade or
the hope of some form of commercial advantage played a role in this, especially
since the trade-happy Mycenaeans were involved.
Whatever caused the war, the fall of Troy sounded the death knell for the
Bronze Age, and the victorious Mycenaeans were themselves swept into the
dustbin of history in less than a century. If golden Achilles and noble Hector
did, indeed, diefighting in a grubby little trade war, it’s best not to raise the
issue in a world literature class.
62 Into the Aegean and out of the Bronze Age