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STILL LOST
ADAM MORROW ON THE TRAIL OF THE VANISHED ARMY OF CAMBYSES
The army marched on wearily through the blistering desert. Fifty thousand strong, it had been dispatched by the Persian king Cambyses II from Thebes, the ancient capital of Egypt. Its mission: to destroy the famed Temple of Amun in Egypt’s Western Desert, home to one of the seven great oracles of the ancient world.
Cambyses had maintained the heady geopolitical expansion begun by his father, Cyrus the Great, vastly enlarging the borders of Persia’s glorious Achaemenian Empire. Campaigning alongside his father, Cambyses had helped to conquer Babylonia, capturing the city of Babylon in 539 BC. He had gone on to invade Egypt in 525 BC, bringing the 26th Dynasty of the pharaohs to an end and inaugurating an era of Persian rule that would last for almost two centuries.
But the priests of Amun attending to the famed desert oracle – whom Alexander the Great, in a bid to legitimise his own imperial pretensions, would visit some 200 years later – were being troublesome. They were refusing to give their blessing to Cambyses’ claim to Egypt. The Persian king, therefore, had sent one of his many battle-hardened armies across the vast desert to put the upstart clerics in their place.
The mission was destined to fail, however. Following a full seven days on the march, suffering from thirst, hunger and blistering heat, the weary army stopped at the oasis of Kharga, deep in Egypt’s Great Sand Sea. After quenching their thirst and that of their animals, resting and no doubt enjoying a hearty meal, the soldiers set out once more.
They were never to be heard from again.
Greek author Herodotus, widely considered the ‘father’ of historical writing, remains the chief source for this famed story. Writing almost 100 years after the fact, Herodotus stated that the ill-fated army had been devoured by a sandstorm – the dreaded khamasin.
“A wind arose from the south, strong and deadly,” the venerable historian recounted, “bringing with it vast columns of whirling sand, which entirely covered up the troops and caused them wholly to disappear.”
And so the army of Cambyses remained buried in Egypt’s desert sands for thousands of years, until – according to a spate of recent news reports – last November. “Vanished Persian army said found in desert,” read the headline of an 8 November 2009 news report in online science magazine Discovery News.
“The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago might have been finally located, solving one of archaeology’s biggest outstanding mysteries,” the website reported. “Bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones found in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert have raised hopes of finally finding the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II.”
The report, which was quickly picked up by a handful of international news agencies, went on to quote expedition member Dario Del Bufalo as saying, “We have found the first archaeological evidence of a story reported by the Greek historian Herodotus.”
The expedition was led by Italian twin brothers and desert explorers Angelo and Alfredo Castiglioni. The Discovery News report recounted how, during an earlier 1996 expedition in the desert around Egypt’s Siwa oasis, the brothers had stumbled across a pot, some old jewel-lery, a handful of ancient weapons and some human remains.
“We are talking of small items, but they are extremely important as they are the first Achaemenid objects, thus dating to Cambyses’ time, which have emerged from the desert sands in a location quite close to Siwa,” Alfredo Castiglioni was quoted as saying. He went on to note that thermoluminescence dating methods had dated the pottery to about 2,500 years ago, “in line with Cambyses’ time.”
In the years following these initial finds, the Castiglioni brothers posited that Cambyses’ army did not take the caravan route by way of the Dakhla and Farafra oases, as had long been assumed by researchers and historians.
“Since the 19th century, many archaeologists and explorers have searched for the lost army along that route,” Castiglioni was quoted as saying by Discovery News. “They found nothing.” Instead, the brothers suggested that the army took a westerly route from the oasis of Kargha, which lies south of Dakhla and Farafra, to Gilf Al-Kebir, before turning north toward Siwa.
During the same expedition, they also found a “mass grave” containing hundreds of bleached bones and skulls. Among them, a number of Persian-era arrowheads and a horse bit were also reportedly unearthed. “In the desolate wilderness of the desert, we have found the most precise location where the tragedy occurred,” Del Bufalo was quoted as saying.
The Italian brothers aren’t the first to claim to have found the lost army. In 1977, the Associated Press reported that an Egyptian archaeological mission had “discovered thousands of bones, swords, and spears of Persian manufacture of the vanished army of King Cambyses… in a region… known as the Great Sea of Sand… Archaeologists are calling it one of the greatest finds of the century.” The story proved to be a hoax, however.
In September 2000, Archaeology magazine ran a similar story: “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 BC.
“The SCA [Supreme Council of Antiquities, the Egyptian body responsible for the country’s cultural heritage] is now organizing a mission to investigate the site in the coming months,” the report continued. “If the remains are in fact those of Cambyses’ vanished army, they will not only solve a mystery but provide us with a rich source of information on the Persian military of the time.” Sadly, the SCA team subsequently dispatched to the site found nothing substantial.
This time around, the SCA did not even send a team to check out the story. Only days after the Discovery News story appeared, Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the SCA, threw cold water on the Castiglioni find.
“I need to inform the public that recent reports published in newspapers, news agencies and television news announcing that ‘twin brothers Angelo and Alfredo Castiglioni have unearthed remains of the Persian army of Cambyses’, are unfounded and misleading,” Hawass announced in a statement released on his website.
“The Castiglioni brothers have not been granted permission by the SCA to excavate in Egypt, so anything they claim to find is not to be believed,” the statement went on. “The SCA has already informed the proper legal and security authorities in Egypt and is taking the necessary procedures.”
Salima Ikram, professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, supports Hawass’ refutation of the find, explaining that the “discoveries” mentioned in the Discovery News article had all been made years ago and had never led to anything substantial.
“The Italian expedition hasn’t made any new discoveries,” says Ikram, who has herself only just returned from the Western Desert. “They’ve simply revisited the issue when, in fact, no one’s come up with anything new at all. So far, Cambyses’ lost army is still lost.”
She adds that both Archaeology and National Geographic have contacted her to confirm the veracity of the initial claim. “I told them both the same thing – that there is no story,” she says.
Ikram blames the affair on hasty reporting by Discovery News, which ran its story based almost entirely on the brothers’ 1996 discoveries.
As for the brothers Castiglioni, the pair enjoy a less than sterling reputation among Egypt’s archaeo-logical community. “They’re not archaeologists,” says Ikram. “They were simply travelling around in the desert and found some stuff. They’re desert explorers with a taste for archaeology, not to be relied upon.”
Nevertheless, the story has taken on a political dimension, with a bearing – albeit a slight one – on Egypt-Iran diplomatic relations, frozen since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. On 29 November 2009, official Iranian news agency Press TV – which had run the initial Discovery News story some two weeks earlier – reported that Iran had urged UN cultural organization UNESCO to “protect the remains of a vanished Persian army of the Achaemenid Empire in Egypt.” Press TV went on to quote an official from Iran’s Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization as saying that Hawass’ rejection of the find’s legitimacy had been due to “political pressure”.
The latest news, reported on Press TV on 10 January this year, is that a group of Iranian archaeologists is planning to go to Egypt “to study the remains of a great Persian army in the Sahara desert”.
Is it possible that the famed lost army of Cambyses – sought by archaeologists and treasure hunters for hundreds of years – never existed at all beyond the realm of legend? Did Herodotus, as some historians have posited, get his information wrong?
Ikram, for her part, doesn’t think so. “It’s not a legend. All these myths have a basis in history,” she says. “The lost army is still waiting to be found, and we’re still looking for it. It remains one of our primary archaeological quests.”
She attributes the lost army’s knack for being “discovered” through the years to its “timeless appeal” for archaeologists and historians. “The quest for the lost army of Cambyses is almost irresistible,” she says. “Imagine: a 50,000-strong Persian army, fully equipped with battle gear, perfectly preserved in the sands of the Western Desert.”
“Discovering the lost army of Cambyses is an archaeologist’s dream,” Ikram concludes. “It’s a sort of holy grail.”
EGYPT’S BURIED WORLD OF MYSTERY
The prospect of discovering the remains of a 50,000-strong army that has lain buried in the desert for more than 2,000 years is the stuff Indiana Jones movies are made of – but Egypt has enough hidden mysteries to provide for another trilogy of Indy films, at least.
The man who ended Persian rule in Egypt was Alexander the Great. When he died in Babylon in 323 BC his body was transported back to the Egyptian city he founded on the Mediterranean, Alexandria, and laid to rest there in a golden sarcophagus. The tomb remained a place of homage for Roman emperors until the fourth century AD, when it abruptly disappeared from records. Various theories have been put forward as to where the remains of the Macedonian king might lie, and every few years another expedition takes up the search. So far, however, the tomb remains elusive.
Then there is Cleopatra, the last monarch in the ruling dynasty founded by Alexander. As you read this, a dig led by a Colombian archaeologist, Dr Kathleen Martinez, is ongoing at Taposiris Magna, a site 45km west of Alexandria. Here the team has discovered a temple dedicated to Isis, the Egyptian deity with whom Cleopatra is closely associated, as well as coins depicting the legendary queen’s profile, and a series of tunnels and chambers underneath the temple floor. Could this be the final desert resting place of Egypt’s most venerated daughter? There have been so many false alarms in the past that no one in the archaeological community is getting too excited, even though most agree that these towering figures do lie somewhere beneath the sands of Egypt and must one day be discovered.
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