Later this year I would like to take a trip of great archaeological interest. I have several sites in mind: Santorini, Catal Huyuk, Egypt and Madaba. However, I find I am short of funds. I need at least $1,000 to subsidize my odyssey. Really a pittance considering the enjoyment I expect to get out of this experience. Do you know any publishers that would contribute? Would you?

As you had no hesitation in asking me, a subscriber to Biblical Archaeology Review (Archaeology Odyssey’s sister publication), to subsidize your new publication, I feel you may want to help fund my expedition. If you send $2,000 my wife could go with me as well!

One thing that I would like to see in Odyssey is travel correspondence. Why not take the idea one step further and create a travel section [see Destinations]. I rather doubt you will have trouble finding willing contributors, skipping from country to country and continent to continent, as the articles come in. You could even encourage your readers to write in as they travel to out-of-the-way sites.

Don’t let Odyssey become “politically correct”! One of the promotional ads carried the blurb, “Life Under A Female Pharaoh.” Okay, so Egypt had a female Pharaoh or two, so what? Just how different was life under those women pharaohs? Not much, I’ll bet. If one of the lady pharaohs were outstanding in some way, then I would certainly like to learn about her, but I don’t care to read an article about a female pharaoh just because she was a woman and some feminist scholar wants to make a propaganda coup out of it, or twist history to make it conform to some feminist ideology.

Articles about women in ancient societies would be very interesting. Since most ancient societies were patriarchal, short biographies about women like Aspasia, Livia and Cleopatra would be refreshing.

Odyssey is the answer to a wish I have had for a long time—that there might be a magazine devoted to the entire Euro-Semitic region, all of the cultures that interacted with one another. I have been dissatisfied for many years with the way this region—the territory of the Mediterranean writ large—tends to be chopped up into smaller areas when the cultures of the region are analyzed and written about. Odyssey is an idea whose time has more than come—it is imperative!