The Lost Army of Cambyses — 50,000 men under the sand

OVERVIEW

According to Herodotus, around 525 BC the Persian king Cambyses II, conquering Egypt, sent 50,000 men to subdue the Oracle of Amun at the Siwa Oasis. Halfway across the Western Desert they were buried by a catastrophic sandstorm and never seen again. Many Egyptologists regard the story as apocryphal.

HISTORY

László Almásy (the 'English Patient') searched; in January 1933 Orde Wingate searched without success. From September 1983 to February 1984 the journalist Gary Chafetz led a $250,000 expedition with Harvard and National Geographic backing across 100 km² of dunes south-west of Bahariya, finding about 500 tumuli but no artefacts; bone fragments dated to about 1500 BC. In 2000 a Helwan University petroleum team reported textiles, metal and human remains it believed were the army's; the antiquities council announced an expedition but released nothing more. In 2009 the Italian brothers Angelo and Alfredo Castiglioni claimed remains, weapons and jewellery near Siwa — in a documentary, not a journal; Zahi Hawass called the reports 'unfounded and misleading'.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

In 2015 Olaf Kaper of Leiden University argued from his Dakhla Oasis excavations that the army was not lost in a sandstorm but ambushed and destroyed by a rebel pharaoh, Petubastis III, and that Darius the Great later spread the sandstorm story to erase the rebel from memory. The army has never been found.

VISITING

The pin marks Siwa Oasis, the army's objective; its route and fate are unknown.