Swallowed by the Sands

Discovering Archaeology (Wayback Machine) ^ | August 2000 | Michael A. Stowe

[SunkenCiv]

"The Persians set forth from [an] oasis across the sand," Herodotus wrote. "As they were at their midday meal, a wind arose from the south, strong and deadly, bringing with it vast columns of whirling sand, which entirely covered up the troops and caused them wholly to disappear."

Recently, however, human remains, daggers, metal arrowheads, and other objects likely associated with just such an army were accidentally discovered by a group of geologists working in the northwestern desert. Now a multidisciplinary team of archaeologists, geologists, and surveyors has been dispatched to determine whether this remote site is the graveyard of the lost army.

[SunkenCiv]

Short article from August 2000, of which this is an even shorter snippet. The magazine was a failure. This is the web archive version.

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[SunkenCiv]

Welcome to Persian History Weekend. ;')

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[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Hey what is the deal with the blockage at web.archive.org?

Message:

________________________________________________

Robots.txt Retrieval Exclusion.

We're sorry, access to http://www.discoveringarchaeology.com/articles/082800-sands.shtml has been blocked by the site owner via robots.txt.
Read more about robots.txt
See the site's robots.txt file.
Try another request or click here to search for all pages on discoveringarchaeology.com/articles/082800-sands.shtml
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[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

OK ....the top link works.....

[SunkenCiv]

Huh, dunno, what the diff' is. There are a dozen or so other archived versions of the story, but that link is the oldest one. I love Web Archive. Here's a Google search for more references to this event.

[SunkenCiv]

The Lost Army Of King Cambyses
Australian Broadcast Corp
9:30pm Wednesday, 7 July

[G]eologist Tom Bown... has developed his own theory to explain the army's fate and has meticulously calculated how long the journey would have taken it. He believes the Persians' lack of understanding of local geography led them into the towering dunes known as the Great Sand Sea, where they perished.

This page also describes the army as 10,000 strong -- Herodotus wrote 50,000 strong. He appears to have exaggerated the size of the Persian army sent against Greece by a large margin ("one million seven hundred thousand men") but the host was very large, and given the attention to logistical detail evidenced in the account (and the campaign against the Scythians which Herodotus describes elsewhere), I don't think there's any reason to reduce 50,000 to 10,000.

The lost army has been looked for plenty of times, considering the remoteness of the place. Other apparent false leads (including one around WWII; gotta do a search on the Afrika Corps plus Qattara) suggest to me that the Persian host was caught in a sandstorm and lost track of itself. This led to the deaths of various parts and pieces through live burial, thirst, etc in quite a numbe of different places, spread over miles. Even some oases in that region have been lost to the sands over the centuries.

[JerseyHighlander]

http://web.archive.org/web/20001018020704/http://www.discoveringarchaeology.com/articles/082800-sands.shtml

Should work for the time being. Might want to re-ping the list though.

[SunkenCiv]

I don't read fiction too often, but there's actually a novel about this (which I haven't read).

---

The Lost Army Of Cambyses by Paul Sussman 1/5/2003

---

[SunkenCiv]

Tourists to Look for Ancient Persian Army
News Service: Iran
2/14/2004 6:24:00 PM

Tourists traversing Egypt's desert may solve a mystery that has puzzled archaeologists for centuries: what happened to the 50,000-man Persian army of King Cambyses... After walking for seven days in the desert, the army got to El-Khargeh, presumably intending to follow the caravan route via the Dakhla Oasis and Farafra Oasis to Siwa. But after they left El-Khargeh, they were never seen again... Nessim will continue the Cambyses expeditions for the next five years. "If we discover anything about the lost army, it will be the discovery of the century," he said.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Program summary

The Lost Army Of King Cambyses

9:30pm Wednesday, 7 July

Recommend to a friend

2500 years ago, an entire army of 10,000 Persians disappeared in the desert. In an attempt to cross the remote and dangerous Western Sahara, they were overwhelmed by a sandstorm and disappeared without a trace. The soldiers owed allegiance to King Cambyses, the Persian who had overthrown the Pharaohs and whose empire was to last 200 years.

Unravelling the mystery of their disappearance has inspired a stream of explorers over the years, including Count Laszlo Almasy, the model for the book and film The English Patient who was a 1930's Hungarian explorer and World War II spy.

Then three years ago an Egyptian archaeologist Aly Barakat found ancient arrowheads and a dagger in an isolated spot near Siwa, prompting geologist Tom Bown and archaeologist Gail MacKinnon to set out to follow this new lead.

The Lost Army of King Cambyses follows Bown and MacKinnon on their journey from Luxor into one of the most dangerous deserts on earth on the trail of the lost army.

Bown has developed his own theory to explain the army's fate and has meticulously calculated how long the journey would have taken it. He believes the Persians' lack of understanding of local geography led them into the towering dunes known as the Great Sand Sea, where they perished.

They explore the area for lost weapons and bones to prove his theory. But, although they find pits from which the dagger and arrowheads were excavated, there is no sign of the bones and skulls and a sandstorm blows up before they can search further.

When they do find bone fragments, MacKinnon is sceptical they belonged to a Persian soldier and puts a brake on Bown's unbridled enthusiasm.

So is the great mystery of ancient Egypt really solved? Watch to draw your own conclusions.

Production Details

Producer/Writer: Nick Ryan. Granite Productions.

Subtitles
Rating:    G 
Subject: Documentary

Text size: AAA

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[SunkenCiv]

That is weird. The first search on Wayback turned up a bunch, and was just a few minutes before I started this thread. I tried a search for the words swallowed and sands (to bypass the problem), and got "server busy".

[Publius6961]

Thank you. I love this stuff.
Ordered immediately, Amazon has it.

[SunkenCiv]

the website doesn't have complete texts (truncated due to a past technical failure I suppose), but all this is still online:

The Histories
Book III "Thalia"
by Herodotus
tr by George Rawlinson

After this Cambyses took counsel with himself, and planned three expeditions. One was against the Carthaginians, another against the Ammonians, and a third against the long-lived Ethiopians, who dwelt in that part of Libya which borders upon the southern sea. He judged it best to despatch his fleet against Carthage and to send some portion of his land army to act against the Ammonians, while his spies went into Ethiopia, under the pretence of carrying presents to the king, but in reality to take note of all they saw, and especially to observe whether there was really what is called "the table of the Sun" in Ethiopia... At Thebes, which he passed through on his way, he detached from his main body some fifty thousand men, and sent them against the Ammonians with orders to carry the people into captivity, and burn the oracle of Jupiter... The men sent to attack the Ammonians, started from Thebes, having guides with them, and may be clearly traced as far as the city Oasis, which is inhabited by Samians, said to be of the tribe Aeschrionia. The place is distant from Thebes seven days' journey across the sand, and is called in our tongue "the Island of the Blessed." Thus far the army is known to have made its way; but thenceforth nothing is to be heard of them, except what the Ammonians, and those who get their knowledge from them, report. It is certain they neither reached the Ammonians, nor even came back to Egypt. Further than this, the Ammonians relate as follows: That the Persians set forth from Oasis across the sand, and had reached about half way between that place and themselves when, as they were at their midday meal, a wind arose from the south, strong and deadly, bringing with it vast columns of whirling sand, which entirely covered up the troops and caused them wholly to disappear. Thus, according to the Ammonians, did it fare with this army.

Thanks JerseyHighlander for the ping suggestion, I'll do it private though. :')

Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on, off, or alter the "Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list --
Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
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[SunkenCiv]

My pleasure. :')

[SunkenCiv]

Here's both editions, as Amazon sometimes sez that one is out of print.

---

The Lost Army Of Cambyses by Paul Sussman paperback	The Lost Army Of Cambyses by Paul Sussman hardcover

---

[SunkenCiv]

:') Thanks.

[SunkenCiv]

Perhaps I should have started the topic with this one, which is still online:

Cambyses' Lost Army
by Salima Ikram
Volume 53 Number 5
September/October 2000

A Helwan University geological team, prospecting for petroleum in Egypt's Western Desert, has come upon well-preserved fragments of textiles, bits of metal resembling weapons, and human remains they believe to be traces of the lost army of the Persian ruler, Cambyses II, who conquered and ruled Egypt in the sixth century B.C.

Apropos of nothing, Salima Ikram has a beautiful face and beguiling accent.

[curmudgeonII]

The implication of Herodotus and others is that this army disappeared without trace in a sandstorm. If nobody witnessed this how did anyone know the disappearance was due to a sandstorm?
Why not a depletion of their water supplies, a revolt of some of the troops [most of the troops were from subject nations] that killed most of the combatants and left the remainder disoriented or dispersed to areas where they could not make their presence widely known for fear of revenge, etc.?

[SunkenCiv]

If nobody witnessed this how did anyone know the disappearance was due to a sandstorm?

The refrigerator light goes off when you close the door. ;')

The sandstorm wasn't localized, there were other witnesses to it. The Persians never came back, and so the obvious inference was, they were killed by it.

It's still a good point, because Herodotus said it struck at their midday meal. But obviously, ancient Persians ate lunch, and the time of onset of the storm would be observed or inferred from those who could take shelter (such as those who lived at el Kharghah).

[SunkenCiv]

DISCOVERIES IN THE WESTERN DESERT of EGYPT
http://www.carlo-bergmann.de/Discoveries/discovery.htm

D.THE ANCIENT (lost) “OASIS BYPATH” and the MILITARY EXPEDITION of CAMBYSES against SIWA OASIS (miscellaneous finds)

When Gerhard Rohlfs and his expedition returned from the desert to the Nile in April 1874 a congregation was held at the Institut E’gyptien over which the eminent German Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch Bey presided. One of the questiones discussed in the meeting was the fatal end of Cambyses’ military expedition to Siwa. According to Herodotus the Persian army consisting of 50.000 soldiers disappeared in a sandstorm shortly after 525 B.C. So far, no traces of the ill-fated mission have been found.

In Drei Monate in der Libyschen Wuste. Kassel 1875 pp. 332-334 Gerhard Rohlfs summarizes the assumptions on the loci where the Persian army could have gone down with all hands. Although this summary had fallen into oblivion for many years it offers a still valid approach for finding a solution to the Cambyses problem.

Since 1986, on half a dozen of expeditions, I set out in search for remains of the Cambyses army. So far, I have identified a 200 km long leg of the ancient (lost) “Oasis Bypath” (Oasenweg) on which I detected four dried up wells and the name of king Qakare’ (1st Intermediate Period). His name, so far, has been found in Lower Nubia only (see Zaba, Z.: The rock inscriptions of Lower Nubia. Prague 1974, pp. 160 ff.); an important hint obtained by field work where the “Oasis Bypath” leads to. On this route I came upon a resting place for ancient caravans. The location is thoroughly covered with hieroglyphic and hieratic texts. Some of the inscriptions can be dated to the time of Ahmose (18th Dynasty). One of the texts gives notice of a military move which might have to do with activities repelling the Hyksos. The resting place is the biggest inscription site so far found in the desert between the oases.

http://www.carlo-bergmann.de/Discoveries/images/image033.jpg

Oasis Bypath - fragment of an insciption at an ancient resting place for caravans

The reign of Ahmose lies 1.000 years ahead of that of Cambyses. To me, it is good fortune that, while hunting for remains of the Persian army, I happened to come across a set of so far unknown ancient texts which reveal information about another famous military expedition.