I can't even imagine the history and ancient cities that are just buried under the sands waiting to be discovered. Most of the really old stuff has not even been excavated due to the violence and danger of the region. Hopefully, someday.

If Cambyses' army was wiped out, how did Herodotus obtained the detailed information he had about them. There must have been a survivor to tell the story.

Its like watching Mulder and Scully. He wants to believe, she's pissing on his parade at every turn.

I love the little figurines that they use to depict the army. Well done! Somebody was REALLY creative.

The woman says about the camel skeleton, "it depends on the weather" when did the weather change last time in the desert. This is full of "i think" "i imagine" "i believe" just a lot of dialogue to cover the fact that they found nothing. At the beginning he says that he is told exactly where to look then looks all over the desert.

The Egyptian minister for antiquities is correct. Deserts swallow armies. This has happened numerous times in history all over the world. Without a detailed examination by experts, those findings could be from any period between the Bronze Age to almost the present day. Because of it's fertility and strategic position, Egypt has been fought over by almost every culture in history so the list of possibilities here is quite long.

I'm Coptic native Alexandrian Egyptian but some of us look somehow like today's Iranians . Salam to Persian cousins

Perhaps after a few days in the desert, the army realized that pressing on was madness and returning to the king without a conquest was also a death sentence, and so they all agreed to just go home and forget about it and send a few messengers back to relay that the army was lost to the sands.

Egyptian to the Persian army: "Ah you head that way and you can't miss it."

Why do they assume they marched during the day? The Persians knew about desert travel.

I know the numbers have been brought into question, but there is another factor: discipline. An army lives off the land and must keep moving (Sherman's March 1864). Foraging induces many to desert (Napoleon's retreat in 1812). They would've left a wide swath of corpses, meaning you stand a small chance of finding any real trace of the army. The other factor is time itself. We often dont find people that get lost in the desert for a mere week. They decompose down to skeletons in a matter of weeks. This being a 2,500+yr old cold case...I wouldnt even bother.

A lot of negative comments i thought it was ok ,some cool historical footage and some nice scenery i found it intresting although why they didn't bring metal detectors is beyond me and also could they get the human bones carbon dated ?

I wonder if anyone ever asked the Bedouins about sites of many bones.These guys have been in this desert for so long,stories would have been passed down through the generations.

Back in Afghanistan, my first grade classmate's name was Kambiz. I think it's the same as Cambyses in this documentary.

2 Questions 1 - Why didn't Baracat record the exact GPS coordinates of the skulls? 2 - Why didn't the archeologists bring a metal detector with them?

In the next episode they will research Herodotus' account of King Midas and his golden touch and try to find golden objects which Midas might have touched.

Why did they not do a metal detect sweep of the area?

"It depends on the weather conditions and the environment..." - Now I'm not a meteorologist, geographer or geologist, but even I know that the Sahara Desert has been *_the Sahara Desert_* - i.e. very hot, very dry & very, very sandy - for literally, and *_at least_* , many thousands of years.

You know what I think is really crazy, having all that armor, then walking miles in the desert. You have to think, no cold water. And we're not even talking about food. It just blows my mind. That people was so much experience at war. Would even consider attempting that trek through the desert. Imagine showing up to do battle, completely exhausted. Depending on those who you conquer, to replenish. It blows my mind.

They didn't take a metal detector? Massive oversight there. Also, how can you say "There were no survivors to their death by sudden sandstorm" if there are no survivors?

I can't imagine been one of those Persian soldier's on the march. They were highly experienced not just in combat but desert survival, and so were their officers. But despite having the experience, the army did got lost. Water started running low, desertion of troops began. Hopelessly trying to escape their fate and still dying of dehydration. Then mutiny with break out amongst the troops. Officers and regulars killing each other for whatever water and food that was left. Finally the desert itself closed in with many sandstorms, ripping the flesh off those men violently. Covering up their remains and any evidence of their existences. It with of been a horrible site to witness honestly. Watching disciplined soldiers break down into their basic need for self survival.

For those of you thinking of watching this for an exciting reveal of "the army", they don't find it. Enjoy people mumbling about their doubts. For 48 minutes...

This could have been done in 5 minutes

Fascinating introduction. Enjoyed the end about comparing the arrowheads in the picture with the actual artefacts at the British Museum made me think that was a pocket of troops dispersed by the sand storm. Someone commented about why they did not metal detect the area but remember they said they were in a military zone. Metal Detectors would not have been allowed.

Every time the Cairo Museum misplaces items and attempts to brush off questions you can be assured they are trying to hide the truth. It's practically Standard Operating Procedure for them.

Colossal waste of time................ Tom and Gale (? & ?) on a totally ridiculous goose chase in the Saharan sands.

Don't complain about all the ads,ENJOY them....best part of the mockumentary..

They finally find something and then it's over. I feel I've wasted my time they really know nothing more then when they started out I think.

The arrowheads make the site quite intriguing. Thank you for a very interesting video.

I was hoping for more than vague conjecture.

Its amazing how much ancient cigarettes resemble today's cigs.

Great documentary, ty

This is my first time hearing of the Cambyses. Even though the archeologists are boring, I would like to find another documentary about this subject.

Maybe Gail can’t tell the age of the camel bones, but I would never dare to question a Bedouin bearing in mind his incomparable knowledge from birth of the desert. I think this is definitely an arrogant thing to have done. I wonder what her credentials were for this particular venture, she seemed incredibly sceptic from the outset

Questions: 1. Why didn't they take one of the bones for carbon dating? 2. How did Herodotus know about what happened when no one survived? 3. All that driving and trouble getting there and no one thought to bring a metal detector to look for armor, weapons, etc.?

Amazing that a vast empty space of mainly desert were fought over & bled to be conquered & controlled.Perhaps the best way to move around is on wide tracked vehicles instead of wheeled ones.

"Is there a sandstorm coming?" "Nope." Cuts to a sandstorm.

I wonder if it wouldn't have been easier to use a vehicle similar to a snowmobile (maybe called a sandmobile) for traveling in the desert? Snow is of course packed harder especially when it's cold, but it could be easier to use one of those than a car when traveling in the desert. I hope there will be a follow up of this program. Maybe Tony Robinson and his Time Team could come and scan the area to see what dark areas they find under the sand?

I like how they have one token skeptic on the expedition who refuses to believe anything that anybody says about any topic, ever. She argues with a Bedouin about camel bones.

you found their bones...but where our their swords, knife and arrow head and shields? you should find thousand of that also

That cigarette uncovered from the sandstorm surely casts some doubt as to the veracity of the age of the weapons? It's a Rothman's king size I think...

Any Archaeological expedition with a leader who is wearing a 200yr old wig just loses any credibility in my eyes.

Well presented content! Keep it up.

Why so much emphasis on the thirst of Cambyses' army when Herodotus never mentioned it?

The amazing thing in the video is that she admitted that they were in fact human bones. I expected her to say "I don't think they are bones...they look more like white rocks,or possibly pottery shards. Maybe a year or two old." I did like the overall video though.

Myth or not it gives a lesson. No matter how powerful you are , nature can lay you low.

Thankyou!

Learning history is interesting .it gives you an idea of how early people lived their lives.

Waste of time. This entire documentary could be reduced to 10 minutes or less. Such as "Archeologist search for Persian King Cambyses' lost army and find a pot in the desert." End of story.

Had a feeling one skull would take an hour for this documentary to find.

tl;dw Reality TV. They don't find anything except a few human bones and they can't have access to the original artifacts, so inconclusive.

OK. So they THINK it's possible the lost army has been found ! Great. Leave Us Hanging. Does anyone else feel cheated or that their leg is being pulled when they go out on the word of a trustworthy geologist, but have to CALL HIM WHEN THEY GET THERE to ask for details about the location of human skulls ??? Lazy as I can be at times I would have done a lot more homework than that . . .

Spoiler alert: they found a pot.

I will save the next view some time *THEY FIND NOTHING*

I remember watching this on tv in 2003 - could do with updating haha

Needs a part 2..

RIP Cyrus the Great and Darius the Great! The best humane leaders that the world has ever seen! Salute to the Persian Empire and Cyrus the Great who created the first charter of human rights!

So many people triggered by a documentary. If it, the army, were, found, you wouldn't be watching a documentary searching for it....

One of the cool things about these older docs is that you can look up the people involved and find out some things. The lady in this one (Gaille Mackinnon) was part of a group that discovered an unknown soldier of Waterloo in 2022. Anywho, this must've been done before GPS was readily available because it seems THEY'RE wandering the desert as much as any army would've back in antiquity. I do like how the Tom guy is all quixotic while Mackinnon keeps dumping cold water on him LOL

This is completely funny yet amazing. Well, science will always continue to baffle me with its doubts and never ending questionings.

I don't "like" videos with ads.

4:50 repeatedly tap this timestamp

What the author / explorers didn´t take into account is, that Achaemenid did in fact have their portions of deserts so they could be accustomed how to deal with them. Even the Macedonians of Alexander were able to overcome them, though they didn´t have any in their home. So, I think their problem was really violent tempest.

I love the mans passion!

If I were the Egyptian archeological expedition and I needed to go check out a lost army that has been found, then I'm going to take a helicopter to check it out. Apparently they just said "dangit, we can't drive any further because of the sand dunes, oh well, we tried"

The arrowheads are without a doubt bronze age persian. The dagger is very likely persian. It seems like they were told NOT to do anything once they got there. Very strange how it all ended. Egyptian weaponry was very different from anyone else's at this time. Would be interesting to see a real expedition visit this place.

This is amazing content. I wish we had more of these on history made today - deserts and the deep of the ocean are surely hiding some exciting secrets! Also one question, wouldnt lidar be able unearth a lot of the things hidden by the sand?

I would have thought that a metal detector would have been on the top of the list of things to bring along to look for metal relics?

"as they were taken their midday meal"... so, there were witnesses or maybe survivors to this event happening in the desert!

Nothing to see here. About 50 minutes of extended click-bait.

He didn't take a GPS location with his phone? You don't need a network, just a GPS App preinstalled for 10m resolution!

A photographic, ultrasound, magnetic surch for anomalies of the desert from a sattelite could localise the quantity of metals left by an army of 10.000 soldiers. I do not understand under which commandement an archaeological mission of such importance can be confied to a sceptical last rang archaelogist .

Im a simple person but If no one survived how does Herodotus have so many details of the alkeged story? ... im not disbeluueving it happened just my first question woukkd be how did Herodotuys have so much detail ....

"Somebody was here with a pot.." At least he had something to pee in..lol

They do a Scully/Mulder routine. But a pretty good one. "This could be a poor soul from the persian army who crawled under here to die" - "These bones could be anyones. Just because there are bones here doesn't mean it's the persian army."

Dig for a long lost army in the desert; brings brush.

Shout out everyone in the comment section who advised me not to watch this documentary and saved me 48 minutes of my life by telling me they only find a pot.

Carbon dating? Bueler?

you would think being seasoned desert travellors they would of picked a full moon, bright evenings so they could travel on the peaks and cross in a cooler heat.

does anyone know the movie excerpt at 2:20 of Babylon being sacked? greatly appreciated looks like a nice vintage film to watch

48 minutes and 41 seconds of my life I can never get back.

*Thanks for the tutorial on how to stretch out a " **-documentary-** " video for **48:41** minutes.*

I got to 3/4 of the movie and decided this was going to be another "Monster Quest" style program. They don't find anything.

Just driving around the desert not finding anything.. I rate this film a 1 out of 5.. 5 being the best rate.

Metal detectors? Why did they seem to not have them?

"Is it possible that one of the great mysteries of the ancient world is about to be solved " No

That cigarette was a good find lol

Well the ad for the show The Chosen was interesting at least.

A doco made AFTER the 'expedition" was known to be a failure. They might just as well follow up with an exciting search for the Garden of Eden.

So how did the priests, villagers and builders get to Siwa to build the temple and settle there in the first place? A large caravan would not have just wandered across 500 miles of desert blind hoping to stumble into an oasis (or die). Further, an oracle completely cut off where no pilgrims could come and no "divination" could be sent out other than by some poor messenger with a 50/50 chance of making it is kind of a useless oracle and would never be influential enough for someone to want to silence it. Egro, there must be a much easier route (e.g. South from the coast rather than west from Thebes etc.) If the Persians ever sent an army that would be how they'd done it. The lost desert army is more likely a myth than a reality.

So how did Greek historian Herodotus know that the killer sandstorm struck the Persian army as they were having their midday meal ? If this happened at all, it would mean that some of the doomed Persian army survived to tell the tale. We know for a fact that King Cambyses never perished in a sandstorm, but died on his way back to Persia. Why is there no Persian or Egyptian record of this ?

Almost all TV documents just sucks like this. 48 minutes of nothing leads to big discovery of nothing.

you forgot the part where he swears loyalty to anubis in exchane for his help in conquering. from this Moment onward he was known as...*the scorpionking*

Posted in r/AskHistorians · 162d Cambyses missing army Has this been solved yet? In short "no," and it probably never will be. As far as I know, the last big toss up about this was a few 10 (wth) years ago when a pair of Italian documentary makers unveiled some graves, arrow heads, wells, and a dagger about 60 miles south of the Siwa Oasis. There were a lot of misleading articles published (even for years afterward) that described them as archaeologists, but they and their "findings" were ultimately disavowed by both Italian and Egyptian archaeological projects and institutions. So, what's the deal with this missing army. To quote Herodotus (our only source for this story): The men sent to attack the Ammonians, started from Thebes, having guides with them, and may be clearly traced as far as the city Oasis.... Thus far the army is known to have made its way; but thenceforth nothing is to be heard of them, except what the Ammonians, and those who get their knowledge from them, report. It is certain they neither reached the Ammonians, nor even came back to Egypt. Further than this, the Ammonians relate as follows: the Persians set forth from Oasis across the sand, and had reached about half way between that place and themselves when, as they were at their midday meal, 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. So there we have it: the extent of our primary knowledge for the disappearance of this army. According to Herodotus, it was sent by Cambyses to seize the Siwa Oasis, an important cult center dedicated to the god Amun and home to a revered oracle in the desert west of the Nile. It was an important location for Egyptian religion, culture, and trade and thus a valuable source of potential revenue. It (along with all of the other western oases) was also a potential center for resistance because it was simultaneously very important and very isolated. Given the opportunity the oasis settlements out in the Sahara could shrug off the government on the Nile if they wanted to. In fact, not long after the events described by Herodotus, we know that's exactly what happened. Sometime between Cambyses' Nubian campaign (c. 524-523 BCE) and Darius I the Great seizing power in Persia (late 522-early 521 BCE) an Egyptian rebel called Petubastis declared himself Pharaoh and made his base in the Dakhla Oasis. I offer the time frame above because we don't know very much about Petubastis. Generally, it is assumed that he went into revolt just like local rebel leaders all over the empire when Darius seized the throne in a coup. The Behistun Inscription, which Darius had made to celebrate his victories over those many rebels, implies that Egypt went into revolt after Darius reconquered Babylon the first time. However, Cambyses also faced a revolt orchestrated by the deposed Pharaoh Psamtick III when he returned from Nubia. The two events, known entirely from different sources, seem to be unrelated, but given our general lack of information about the events, it is entirely plausible that there was some form of continuous resistance in western Egypt. After Petubastis was defeated, perhaps as late as 518 BCE, Darius commissioned a series of temple constructions and other building projects in the Oases to try and strengthen Persian ties with the isolated region. It doesn't seem to have worked very well, but he tried. This brings us to the two possibilities for what happened to that army: 1) The story happened more or less as Herodotus tells it. Cambyses sent an army to capture Siwa. They were caught in a sand storm and never seen again. The biggest problem with this theory is that, despite one ancient Greek's claim to the contrary, it is extremely unlikely to die in a sand storm. It just doesn't happen, certainly not to thousands of people all at once. What is possible is that they could have lost their way, had supplies damaged, or otherwise have gotten stuck out in the desert. If that were the case, they might have slowly perished, either wandering aimlessly, or desperately trying to reach a safe haven, either in Siwa or back in the east. In that case, they might have been spread out and perished on the established routes to and from Siwa. In that case, their equipment may have been pillaged by other caravans or armies passing through the region. This option is generally considered less likely by historians. 2) More plausibly, especially because Herodotus cites the Ammonians themselves as the source of this information, is that the Persian army headed to Siwa was ambushed and defeated. This explanation, if any, is accepted by a growing number of historians. In this scenario, it could have been the result of rebels associated with either rebel Pharaoh from this time period, the Ammonians acting on their own, or other parties entirely. Basically anyone in west Egypt who didn't want the Persians in charge is a fair candidate. Petubastis is probably the best option because we know he had a later power base in the region. One very interesting theory, suggested by Egyptologist Olaf Kaper and a growing number of other scholars, is that this army was not sent by Cambyses at all. Kaper has theorized that the army lost on its way to Siwa was actually sent by Darius to put down the revolt of Petubastis which followed the trajectory I described in option 2. The theory is that Darius then attributed the failure to Cambyses in a propoganda story that was later picked up by Herodotus. This would be entirely in keeping with Darius and Cambyses historiography. Darius is widely believed to have invented of misconstrued the figure of Gaumata in the Behistun Inscription to cover his own tracks after assassinating the rightful king, Bardiya. In the same inscription he claims that almost all of the rebels were impostors and false claimants to their respective thrones. Meanwhile Herodotus reports horror stories of Cambyses going mad, destroying Egyptian temples, desecrating religious rites, and generally committing atrocities. Despite what Herodotus says, we have Egyptian records that state almost exactly the opposite. One hypothesis is that Darius propagated these stories to try and discredit Cambyses' reign and ease the transition to a new ruling family. Shunting his own lost army back on to Camyses would be very much in character for Darius the Great. So do we have definitive answers? No, but good theories with good evidence abound. Major secondary sources: Encyclopaedia Iranica A Political History of the Achaemenid Empire by Muhammad Dandamaev From Cyrus to Alexander by Pierre Briant

Yeah, I'd like to see the FULL documentary on this. Why was it even edited and distributed? A sort of compressed 15-20 min. lecture + slides would do the trick..Tawn. I expected so much better from this series.

The idea that Cambyses had an army that was lost in the desert at all is in itself a highly disputed idea, but the docu presents the idea as if it was some kind of fact, when most likely there never was any Persian army lost in the desert.

for documentaries of this kind, i only watch the first 2 mins then scan the last 5 mins for the conclusion. i hate this kind of presentation...

HEY HAVE YOU GUYS EVER HEARD OF CARBON DATING ?? lol

I wished I'd read the comments first! What a wasted opportunity these people had, they set out on a mammoth journey to find this site and once there did almost nothing a tourist wouldn't do. Thanks for the upload it was interesting, but I was really disappointed with the actual documentary itself and any lack of effort on their part to investigate the sites.

The flying cats in the thumbnail brought me here.