Coming Soon: The Secret of the Goats of Ganj Dareh

Book Eight is on its way, and the cover is ready, so here is a first look.

The Secret of the Goats of Ganj Dareh takes Aryan and Ariana, with Grandpa and Homa, to one of the oldest villages anywhere in the world.

I will not tell you the secret yet. But I can tell you where we are going, and why I wanted to take the children there.

Where is Ganj Dareh?

Ganj Dareh is a small mound in the Zagros Mountains of western Iran. The name means "Treasure Valley." For a very long time it looked like nothing more than a hill. Then archaeologists dug into it and found a village, more than 10,000 years old, with small mud-brick rooms built close together.

That makes it one of the earliest farming villages we know of. The people who lived there were among the first in the world to settle in one place, plant crops and keep animals instead of following wild herds from valley to valley.

Why goats?

Of all the animals those villagers lived alongside, the goats are the ones that changed the most. Ganj Dareh has some of the oldest evidence anywhere that people were herding goats. It is one of the places where an animal that had always been wild began, slowly, to live with people.

Think about what that means for an ordinary morning in the village. Someone has to feed the animals, someone has to keep them from wandering, and someone, very probably, is a child who has decided that a baby goat is the best thing that has ever happened.

You can see a bit of that on the cover. Aryan and Ariana are kneeling in the dust of a village that is 10,000 years old, each with a baby goat close by.

Based on real discoveries

Like every book in the series, this one is built on what archaeologists have actually found. Look at the scroll on the cover: Based on actual archaeological findings. The children and their adventure are fiction. The village, and the things people did in it, are not.

If you would like to read more about the world this book comes from before it arrives, Why Iran's Real History Starts Long Before the Achaemenids shows where villages like Ganj Dareh sit in the long story of the Iranian Plateau.

When can you get it?

Not quite yet. The book page is up now, and you can ask to be notified the moment it is available.

In the meantime, all seven published books are ready to read, and the newest, The Ancient Orchestra of Madaktu, came out two weeks ago.