Mariam

Mariam (aka Judith) is the main character from a novel of mine, a retelling of the Judith and Holofernes legend. I took a lot of liberties with the original story (which, in my defense, is pretty ahistorical to begin with)- I reset it in the Beqaa valley, in a fictionalized Baalbek. Here, Mariam is dressed in clothes and jewelry borrowed from one of her Canaanite friends. The triple plait hairstyle (two thin plaits over the shoulders, and one thick plait in back) is a style I'd seen on a lot of Canaanite and Aramaean statues from the neo-Assyrian period.