A native New Yorker, Arthur Houghton was educated at Harvard University (BA 1963, MA 1982) and the American University of Beirut (MA 1966). As a member of the U.S. Foreign Service from 1966 to 1980, he held positions in Beirut, Amman, Cairo, and Washington. He entered Harvard's graduate program in Art History in 1980 and was appointed associate curator, then curator in charge of the department of antiquities of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California, from 1982 to 1986, before returning to Washington to serve as a White House foreign affairs specialist. He left public service in 1995 to found a consulting firm that partners U.S. and foreign businesses, principally in the Middle East.
Houghton has written or co-authored four books and some forty articles on economic, monetary and financial aspects of the ancient world. His first novel, Dark Athena, centers on a curator whose efforts to uncover the shadowy origin of a colossal statue that is to be the signature acquisition of his museum reveals a conspiracy involving the Sicilian capo responsible for the object's illegal excavation, a London dealer, and the museum's own director - and triggers a murderous response that plays out inside the museum's grounds and interior galleries. A sequel, Saladin's Fire, deals with conflict and struggle within the dark world of the CIA and between the CIA and Israel's Mossad over the revelation of a thermonuclear weapon inside Syria and the urgent need to find and destroy it.
Houghton has lived and traveled extensively in the Middle East and North Africa. He serves on two museum boards, a committee of the U.S. Mint, and heads the Cultural Policy Research Institute, an organization founded to carry out studies of national and international policies to protect antiquities, monuments and archaeological sites. He lives in Cockeysville, Maryland, with his wife, Peggy Fox, a professional photographer and artist.