Judith Starkston has spent too much time exploring the remains of the ancient worlds of the Greeks and Hittites. Their myths and clashes inspire her fiction and open gates to magical realms. She has degrees in Classics from the University of California, Santa Cruz and Cornell. She loves myths and telling stories, and her novels imbue fantasy with the richness of ancient worlds. The first book in her Trojan Threads Series, Hand of Fire was a semi-finalist for the M.M. Bennett’s Award for Historical Fiction. Priestess of Ishana, the first in her historical fantasy Tesha series, won the San Diego State University Conference Choice Award. Judith is represented by Richard Curtis.
The recent designation of Arslantepe, a dig in southeastern Turkey, as a World Heritage site has got me exploring this ancient city’s significance in light of my own fiction. Politics and artwork both reveal intriguing ways that this site–which I wasn’t familiar with previously–reflects the historical realities that I incorporate into my fiction.
I’m not traveling to Egypt anytime soon, but I’m happy to armchair visit to view the newly restored tomb of Pharaoh Djoser, one of the early rulers and builder of the step pyramid. Why did he build a tomb and a pyramid?
An institute’s renowned ancient seed collection, the complex history of archaeology in Turkey, and Erdogan’s government. The Smithsonian Magazine’s take on a complicated conflict.
When someone says they’ve found new archaeological evidence of powerful women in the Bronze Age, I certainly perk up. Iberian women, it turns out. With crowns.
Go to Neolithic Göbekli Tepe (11,600 years old), and you will find one of the most mysterious archaeological sites in Turkey. The huge T-shaped stone pillars carved with humans and fantastical animals form impressive circles. Evidence from the site reveals people gathered there seasonally in extraordinary numbers. One of the enduring questions about this remarkable place concerns how a hunter-gatherer culture could supply the food for the massive feasts that took place. What did they eat? There’s an intriguing new answer and it took some open mindedness and cooking to find.
The Trojan War gets a humorous treatment in the New Yorker Magazine with a spoof diary by “the guy who drove the Trojan Horse back from Troy.” For those who love Greek mythology and literature, and wish to put a smile on their faces.
History is more than a series of dates, but sometimes the date itself accumulates its own history. So it is with 1200 BCE when nothing happened and yet history tells us the world ended. The entertaining story of how “1200 BCE” came to be.
Clearly, I’m a fan of the delightful hybrid creatures of the ancient Near East. Griffins appear (part lion, part eagle) in my fiction. I often point out the prevalence of griffins across the Mediterranean and Near East as portrayed on the architecture, seals, and other forms of art. I sometimes say in jest that given how often they are depicted, maybe they really lived on earth at some point.
But seriously, why are there so many hybrid creatures across the many cultures of the ancient world? Why do many versions of Egyptian gods have human bodies and animal heads, for example? I have wondered.
An interesting article offers an intriguing theory. Maybe I buy it, maybe not–but I’m having fun.
A man’s last meal, 2400 years ago during the Iron Age in what is now Denmark, undergoes a fascinating analysis, but I also want to know the circumstances of his mysterious death. Culinary history meets murder mystery. Read on!
Air pollution is a modern problem not an ancient one—or at least at first glance you’d think so. But maybe the lungs of the Neolithic inhabitants of Çatalhöyük would beg to differ.
