ARTHUR HOUGHTON
Biography
In early 2007, Arthur Houghton was inspired to write a story that combined his experience as a curator of Antiquities of the J. Paul Getty Museum with the thirteen years he spent as a career Foreign Service Officer. The work of fiction that emerged is Silent Athena, a narrative of a looted statue, a worldwide criminal conspiracy, panicked flight, and resolution.
A native New Yorker, Arthur Houghton was educated at Harvard University (BA 1963, MA 1982) and the American University of Beirut (MA 1966). He entered the Department of State in 1966 and served in Beirut, Amman and Cairo, as well as in Washington (State Department, National Security Council, U.S. Senate staff) before leaving to enter Harvard’s graduate program in Art History. He was appointed Associate Curator of Antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1982 and served at the Getty as Acting Curator-in-Charge of Antiquities from 1984 to 1986 before returning to government service as a foreign affairs specialist in the White House. He left public service in 1990 to found Arthur Houghton Associates, a business consulting firm with special interest in the Arab Middle East.
Houghton has lived and traveled extensively in the Middle East and North Africa, and speaks Arabic and French. He serves on a number of museum boards and is a former member of the U.S. Cultural Property Advisory Committee. In addition to Silent Athena and a sequel, Saladin’s Fire, that is to be completed in the spring of 2008, he has written or co-authored four books and some forty articles on economic, monetary and financial aspects of the Seleucid state (312-64 B.C.).
Houghton lives with his wife, Peggy Fox, a professional photographer and artist, in Cockeysville, Maryland. His son, daughter-in-law, and a small grandson, live in San Francisco.