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Most people would probably think you have to be a bit odd to be excited by this news.
But it worked for me!
Archaeologists believe they have found the remains of a Persian army comprising 50,000 soldiers that supposedly “vanished” in the desert while on campaign in Egypt in 525 B.C.
Discovery News reported Monday that Italian researchers have found bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones found in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert, raising hopes of finally finding the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II.
The 50,000 warriors were believed to have been buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C.
“We have found the first archaeological evidence of a story reported by the Greek historian Herodotus,” Dario Del Bufalo, a member of the expedition from the University of Lecce, told Discovery News.
Things had been going quite well for the Achaemenid Dynasty up to this point, and the still fledgling Persian Empire had already grown to reach the borders of India, Egypt and the Aegean.
But while Cambyses had inherited many things from his father, Cyrus “The Great,” he certainly didn’t inherit his luck, and Persian fortunes were about to take a dive.
Prior to his death in 529 B.C. Cyrus had planned to add Egypt to the Persian Empire. In 525 B.C. Cambyses undertook the campaign planned by his father, and won a decisive victory over an Egyptian army backed by Greek mercenaries at Pelusium, enabling him to seize the Egyptian throne.
Unfortunately, the priests at the Temple of Amun at the Oasis of Siwa refused to legitimize Cambyses’ claim to Egypt, and Herodotus (484-425 B.C.) wrote that Cambyses sent 50,000 soldiers from Thebes to attack the oasis and destroy the oracle at the temple.
After walking for seven days in the desert, the army reached an oasis, which historians believe was El-Kharga. After they left that site, they were never seen again.
“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,” wrote Herodotus.
A century after Herodotus wrote his account, Alexander “The Great” made his own pilgrimage to the oracle of Amun, and in 332 B.C. he won the oracle’s confirmation that he was the divine son of Zeus, the Greek god equated with Amun.
The tale of Cambyses’ lost army, however, faded into antiquity. As no trace of the hapless warriors was ever found, scholars began to dismiss the story as a fanciful tale.
(Despite the setback, the Persians maintained rule over Egypt for another 175 years. Cambyses himself only ruled for three of these, dying in Syria while returning home to Persia from Egypt.)
Now, however, two Italian archaeologists claim to have found evidence that the Persian army was indeed swallowed in a sandstorm. Twin brothers Angelo and Alfredo Castiglioni recently presented their discovery at the archaeological film festival of Rovereto, after 13 years of research and five expeditions to the desert.
While excavating on a separate project in 1996, the brothers found human remains and various weapons.
Further analysis dated the relics to the era of the Achaemenid rulers of Persia, and more particularly to the era of Cambyses.
In the years following their discovery, the Castiglioni brothers studied ancient maps and came to the conclusion that Cambyses’ army did not take the widely believed caravan route via the Dakhla Oasis and Farafra Oasis.
The brothers found that as early as the 18th Dynasty (c1567-1306 B.C.), another route through the area had existed, and they considered a different itinerary, coming from south.
According to the Castiglioni brothers, the army took a westerly route from El Kargha to Gilf El Kebir, passing through the Wadi Abd el Melik, then headed north toward Siwa.
The brothers note that this route would have enabled the Persians to bypass an oasis in Egyptian possession, saving them from having to fight every inch of the way.
To test their hypothesis, the Castiglioni brothers did geological surveys along their proposed alternate route. They found desiccated water sources and artificial wells made of hundreds of water pots buried in the sand. Such water sources could have made a march in the desert possible.
“Thermoluminescence has dated the pottery to 2,500 years ago, which is in line with Cambyses’ time,” Castiglioni said.
In their last expedition in 2002, the Castiglioni brothers returned to the location of their initial discovery. Right there, some 62 miles south of Siwa, ancient maps had erroneously located the temple of Amun.
Instead of the temple for which they were searching, the soldiers found the khamsin - the hot, strong, unpredictable southeasterly wind that blows from the Sahara desert over Egypt.
At the end of their 2002 expedition, the Castiglioni team decided to investigate Bedouin stories about thousands of white bones that emerged decades ago during particular wind conditions in a nearby area.
Indeed, they found a mass grave with hundreds of bleached bones and skulls.
Tomb robbers had already stripped the site of many of its treasures, but among the bones, a number of Persian arrow heads and a horse bit, identical to one appearing in a depiction of an ancient Persian horse, emerged.
Perhaps finally, some 2,500 years later, the mystery behind the first real disaster of the Achaemenid Empire’s reign is ready to be solved.
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