Ancient World Magazine was founded in 2017 as a platform for academically trained archaeologists and ancient historians to publish accessible articles about the ancient world. Visitor numbers grew steadily to in exess of 35,000 readers a month. We were super successful!
Unfortunately, running a website costs money and we firmly believed that whoever worked for the website needed to be compensated in some way. We launched a Patreon campaign, but once we hit a little over 40 patrons, it stagnated. Eventually, I decided that the website had probably run its course and I pulled the plug in March 2022. The content was moved to my personal website by July.
Still, this situation was not ideal. Ancient World Magazine fills an obvious void. It offers quality articles written in an accessible way by people with a relevant academic background. There isn’t anything like it on the internet. Patreon didn’t work, but there are reasons for this. Most readers of Ancient World Magazine arrive here via search engines. There are some superfans who read most of the website, but those are outliers; a few of them became patrons. Most readers look for something specific and Google (or whatever) recommends they read one of our articles. Most of the time, they then move on to other things.
In other words, in order to make the website work financially we need people to support our Patreon, but we also, ideally, find sponsors who are willing to contribute larger sums of money. For the long term health of the website and those who work on it, we need more financial support than we have received so far. As a result, our main focus will be on trying to get companies and institutions to sponsor the website.
In the meantime, Ancient World Magazine is back. The website won’t be going anywhere again, and all links should still work. If you linked to my personal website in the past year, those links should be properly forwarded again to this website.
In the past, Ancient World Magazine got a fresh article about once a week. That is not going to happen now until we secure some kind of funding. I have a few articles that I want to work on and finish, including one on Mycenaean figurines that is quite far along, but I do also have to devote time to doing paid work, and as a result the website will be updated only sporadically.
We do again accept submissions for articles, but note that we are unfortunately unable to pay you for your work. If you are okay with that, then please do feel free to send us your proposal and we will get back to you as soon as can.