Mission to seek lost Persian army in Egypt desert
CAIRO, April 11 (Reuters) - Archaeologists head into Egypt's Western
Desert next month to try to solve an ancient mystery -- the fate of the
lost Persian army of Cambyses.
Mohamed al-Soghayer, head of the Pharaonic Antiquities Department, told
Reuters the team of eight will spend up to a month camped in the desert,
excavating a remote site where remains of weaponry and human bones have
been discovered.
He said it could be the place where the army of Persian King Cambyses,
who finished off the 26th dynasty of the Pharaohs in 525 BC, ushering in
two centuries of Persian rule in ancient Egypt, disappeared and perished
in the desert.
"The army was resting there when a sandstorm started," Soghayer
said. "The site is about 10 square km (3-3/4 square miles). The team
will have three archaeologists, one anthropologist, one surveyor and three
geological experts."
According to Herodotus, the celebrated Greek historian of the ancient
world, an army of 50,000 set out from the Pharaonic capital of Thebes,
now part of the southern town of Luxor, to destroy the temple of Amun at
the Siwa oasis near Libya.
A famed oracle at Siwa -- which later predicted the success of Macedonian
general Alexander the Great -- had prophesied a bloody end to Cambyses
and Persian rule in Egypt.
Herodotus said the army stopped at two desert oases before disappearing
without trace, baffling archaeologists ever since.
Two years ago a team of Egyptian geologists came across metal parts,
arrowheads, daggers, knives and human remains by accident in the sand,
said Samia Merghani, an anthropologist who will travel as part of the team.
"We want to get specimens so we can do analyses on them and we
also want to see the shape of arrows and daggers to see if they are Egyptian
or not," she added.
The site is 150 km (94 miles) from Siwa, where the oracle was based.
"That's why I always say it was their closeness to the Amun temple
that sank them," Merghani said.
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