In all the explorations or campaigns of the peoples, the weather factor was sometimes an ally and sometimes an enemy. Those who knew the weather conditions of each place or the sea currents, the winds exploited them not only for commercial trips but also for defensive or offensive operations. One of the greatest mysteries of antiquity is finding the spot where 50,000 elite men of the Persian army perished after a powerful sandstorm in 524 BC in the Sahara desert.
In the third book, called Thalia, Herodotus tells how the son of Cyrus the Great, Cambyses , began to conquer after Egypt, the rest of Africa in 525 BC. He planned three campaigns, one to Carthage , one to Shiva and one to Ethiopia . From Thebes, where he was encamped, he ordered his fleet to proceed to Carthage, and sent an expeditionary force of 50,000 men to Siva, with orders to capture its unruly people and burn the Temple of Ammon Zeus. As Herodotus informs us (3.26), Cambyses sent his army to destroy the oracle of Ammon in the Oasis of Siva, because the priests of the oracle refused to legitimize his recovery to the throne of Egypt.
But “when the Persians set out from the city of Oasis against the Ammonites crossing the desert and while they were about halfway between their city and the Oasis, during the meal a great wind blew and buried them all. That's how they got lost..." .
This is what Herodotus wrote, but no later historian believed him. How can an army of 50,000 men be wiped out without anyone else reporting it except the -eyewitness- Herodotus? Despite the "unhistorical" nature of the subject, in April 1874, the famous German Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch Bey presided over a meeting at the Institut Egyptien , where the "fantastic" fate of Cambyses' army dominated as a theme.
In January 1933, English army officer Ornet Charles Wingate unsuccessfully explored the Egyptian Western Desert, then known as the Libyan Desert, looking for the lost army of Cambyses. In February 1977, it was announced that archaeologists had found remains of the Cambyses army, only to soon be proven to be a hoax. Between September 1983 and February 1984, American journalist and author Gary Chaifage led an expedition, funded by Harvard University, National Geographic, the Egyptian Geological and Mineral Survey, and the Ligabue Research Institute, along the Libyan border. The search lasted six months and covered an area of 100 square kilometers full of sand dunes, from the uninhabited Bahrain Oasis to the Shiva Oasis but there were no significant finds
Since then no archaeologist seemed to be dealing with the matter. Nobody, except two Italian documentary filmmakers, the twins Angelo and Alfredo Castiglioni . They began to deal with this issue since 1996, when they found themselves near Shiva looking for remnants of iron meteorites. They accidentally found a half-buried clay pitcher and human remains in what looked like a sandstorm shelter. Their Cairo University partner's metal detector had begun to beep, and they unearthed a silver bracelet, a warrior's earring, beads from a necklace, the hilt of a bronze sword, and several arrowheads. All were analyzed with modern methods and found to belong to the time of Cambyses. The Castiglioni brothers officially informed Egypt's Geological Survey of their findings but received no response. The Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt proceeded to announce the initiation of an investigation, without any published information about this action and the result.
According to their reasoning, the "Oasis city" of Herodotus is present-day Kharga. From there Cambyses' army chose to follow the forgotten southern route in order to attack Shiva from her unguarded side. After seven days of marching through the desert, they reached the point where the map indicated Shiva, but they did not know that they were still 100 kilometers south of it. Then, at noon, the terrible SE wind of the desert, Hamsin, arose, covering the sky with sand. The soldiers desperately tried to find some shelter, but most were buried alive. Those who found a ledge on some rock survived for a while , like the one the Castiglioni found in 1996.
The shelter was a rock 35 meters long, almost 2 meters high and 3 meters deep. Unfortunately the course of the action of the Castiglioni brothers tarnished because of their "controversial" past (producers of controversial documentaries) and not publishing their findings through any formal study . When the matter became widespread, the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt declared that all this was baseless and that the Castiglioni brothers never had permission to excavate.
The other view that interprets what happened to Cambyses' army
Olaf Kapper, a professor of archeology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, claims to know what happened to the army. Capper interprets the disappearance differently. He says that the army was not buried under sand dunes, but defeated in battle. He speculates that the final destination of the army was the oasis of Dakhla, where the troops of the Egyptian rebel Petubasti III were stationed.
He ambushed the army of Cambyses, crushed him and managed to regain a large part of Egypt, which enabled him to be crowned Pharaoh in Memphis.
Capper claims that the fate of the army was so long overlooked because the Persian king Darius I, who suppressed the Egyptian revolt two years after Cambyses' defeat, attributed his predecessor's humiliating defeat to the elements of nature, a sandstorm, so as not to lose prestige of the Persian army.
This explanation prevailed 75 years after Herodotus also adopted . Caper's excavations at the Dakhla oasis revealed tablets inscribed with the name of Petumbasti in temples, which indicates that the area was his stronghold in the early Persian period. Once Capper combined the findings and the information about Petumbasti he was able to put the pieces of the puzzle together and give his own interpretation to the mystery of the army's "disappearance".
Professor Caper's excavations in Almeida of the Dakhla Oasis brought to light the titles of Petumbasti III that are engraved on the facade of an ancient temple. "The temple boulders show that this building must have been a fortress at the beginning of the Persian occupation" , says Capper. "However, since we found more information about the hitherto unknown Petumbasti III, we can say what exactly happened".
Obviously, however, the investigations that will follow will shed more light on one of the greatest mysteries of antiquity. The fact is that the desert and the surprise attacks of Cambyses' opponents decimated his army. After this development, Cambyses went insane , killed all his close relatives and committed suicide.
Source 1. https://www.greek-language.gr/digitalResources/ancient_greek/library/browse.html?text_id=30&page=74 (We recommend you read it all)
Source 2. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2672378/Was-missing-Persian-army-killed-AMBUSH-Hieroglyphs-finally-solve-5th-century-disappearance-50-000-men .html
Source 3. The Story of a Butterfly - Th. Kolidas
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