The Great Persian Army That Vanished | The Lost Army Of King Cambyses | Odyssey

[Music] six centuries before christ the inhabitants of the egyptian oasis of siwa looked out of the sahara and held their breaths at the heart of the oasis was one of the most powerful propaganda weapons of the ancient world the oracle of ammon just days away was a mighty persian army on a mission to destroy it the army never arrived engulfed by a sandstorm they were said to have been lost without trace but is it just legend or terrible truth geologist tom barn dreams of solving the mystery of the fate of the army and has a startling new theory you told me that you found human skulls archaeologist gail mckinnon hopes to find warriors entombed in the sand and desert guide walid ramadan is the man they'll depend on to keep them alive amidst the dangers of egypt's great sand sea generations of adventurers have unsuccessfully scoured the desert for the remains of the lost army amongst them count laszlo al-mashi the model for the so-called english patient but this expedition has a dramatic new discovery to investigate published in a cairo newspaper this photograph of ancient arrowheads has reignited the hunt for the lost army suggesting that legend might after all be fact people were struck by the find in the tomb of king tut he was one king can you imagine five or ten thousand soldiers bronze armor weapons skulls um skeletons possibly chariots everything you can think of it's a huge treasure if you can think of it that way it would be the archaeological finals of not end of the century but several centuries [Music] in 539 bc cyrus king of persia defeated babylon founding the largest empire the world had ever seen when his son cambises went on to conquer egypt in 525 bc he sent an army to attack a small oasis the rest is history or a tall story the greek writer herodotus was the most famous historian of the ancient world a single paragraph he wrote reads like fiction but may be the only evidence for the hideous fate of cambisi's army cambises detached a body of 50 000 men with orders to attack the ammonians reduce them to slavery and burn the oracle the force started from thebes and may be traced as far as the town of oasis seven days journey across the sand general report has it that when the army had left oasis and in their march across the desert had reached a point about midway a southerly wind of extreme violence drove the sand in heaps over them as they were taking their midday meal so that they disappeared forever i think if cambodia's army were to be found in the desert i think it would spell the end of one of the long-standing mysteries um in ancient history what happened to cambyse's army is herodotus account really true tom barn has been obsessed with the mystery of cambise's lost army for decades he's one of many whose imagination has been fired by the lurid tale told by herodotus novelists have borrowed the plot adventurers have used the history as inspiration laszlo al-mashi the explorer immortalized as the english patient spent years searching the egyptian desert for the lost army just before he died in 1951 he told a friend he was on the verge of finding it he said that he had a pretty good idea of where it might be and he also said that he had found certain artifacts he never actually indicated on the map to any of us where exactly he thought this might be he was very very willing to talk about it but not be willing to tell us exactly where to look [Music] if almashi did find the lost army he took the secret of its location to his grave half a century on a cairo newspaper reported a sensational discovery in the western desert the paper said that the army of king cam bises had been found at last by a geologist dr ali barakat to archaeologists the claim was highly controversial but in the coffee shops of cairo they spoke of little else so this is an arrowhead the expedition's guide walid ramadan translates the article for archaeologist gail mckinnon who is this guy here that's dr ali barakat he was the boss of this expedition so he actually took these photographs that we're seeing and identified this area on the map okay what do you think about this story do you really believe that i believe what i see by my own eyes so you're not quite sure we have to go and see going to sea will mean a dangerous journey deep into the sahara the dry sands of the desert can preserve bodies and relics for thousands of years so it's perfectly possible that the shifting sands could have revealed cambise's army expedition will not be the first to try to reach the remote site where dr ali barakat made his discoveries egypt's supreme council of antiquities despite being publicly skeptical about a geologist's claims sent archaeologists into the desert to investigate dr barakat was not invited to join them before long the archaeologist vehicles became irredeemably bogged down dr barakat's site remained tantalizingly out of reach and the mystery unresolved a fellow geologist tom bahn has worked with ali before he has faith in his judgment and is convinced his claims should be followed up so tom what's ali's background is he an archaeologist or a historian no he's a geologist but he's very widely read so to him i can imagine him thinking that he's coming up with what appears to be weaponry and bodies in this area where other people have looked and other people have thought might be the hiding place for the residue of ken bise's army then i think his his views are sincere i think i think that he believes that he has found part of a lost army it makes sense in this area it's talking about it could be one of the areas exactly it's all very interesting it'll be wonderful to see ellie's photographs and hear a story yeah i'm still imbued with a little skepticism about the whole thing quite frankly i'm not really sure what to think about it the team visit dr barakat at his inner city home in cairo to hear the full story of his discovery ali the finds that you made are truly remarkable there's no question and and uh looks like arrow points possibly a spear point um a dagger um and lots and lots of human bones caleb what does that look like to your lance point or a knife blade can't see it too well from here it looks like the socket of a spear head but i can't really there's no scale so i don't really know were there a lot of bones when you got out yes after we we found this we found many bombs on the ground do you think that the whole army is out there or do you believe that uh you found some of the army it turns out ali's fines were made by chance on a brief geological field trip there wasn't time for a full search of the area he's confident another expedition will confirm that the lost army really has been found at last and probably from here we may find the whole army probably from this area three hundred miles up the nile from cairo was ancient themes it was from here that cambises launched his desert campaign after his conquest of egypt in 525 bc [Music] unfortunately dr barakat is unable to join the expedition much of the western desert of egypt is a restricted military zone and he's not been granted a permit to revisit the site of his discoveries but he has provided tom and gail with his photographs and told them exactly where to look on the western bank of the nile the team's vehicles drivers and supplies are waiting this is the backup and this is the one we'll drive josem is the cook who's the most important man here [Music] the journey to the edge of the desert traces a caravan route that would have been old when the persians marched down it two and a half thousand years ago the persian army was generally composed of a whole number of different ethnic contingents the later accounts of the persian invasion of greece say that all the peoples of asia were represented so it would have been a very dazzling exciting sight if you were not on the wrong side of it the persian army from descriptions we have in other contexts tended not to travel light the persian exhibition to greece had a huge baggage train they even brought concubines with them as well as camel trains full of of provisions it was said in that case that the persians drank all the rivers in greece dry cambises had angered the egyptian priests by his overthrow of the pharaoh and as his army set off on the long and dangerous journey to siwa they may have faced not just the vast waterless expanse of the western desert but also the wrath of the oracle of siwa the priests were immensely powerful in egypt to see if you got on the wrong side of the priesthood in trouble and of course many of the oracles said what the priests wanted them to say and it is possible that the oracle of siwa predicted doom for this interloper doom and death cambise's troops thought they'd left the nile valley on a routine mission they knew that hundreds of miles of terrifyingly waterless desert lay between them and their goal [Music] what they didn't know was that they wouldn't be coming back [Music] to follow in the footsteps of king cambise's last army the expedition must first visit carga which the historian herodotus called oasis it was the last place where he said they were seen alive the force which was sent against the ammonians started from thebes and may be traced as far as the town of oasis seven days journey across the sand the approach is still dominated by a mud brick fortress that was already ancient when the persian invaders appeared out of the desert well the fort was certainly here in persian times so therefore it's quite likely that it was garrison so perhaps the first thing that the persians had to do was they burst into cargo oasis was reduced this war it's certainly a certainly commanding view of the entire oasis in a commanding position herodotus states that the army took a week to cover the 130 miles from the nile valley to kaga if they managed to keep up this rate of 18 miles a day on foot without any shade in blistering temperatures it would have taken them more than three weeks to cross the desert to siwa and that's assuming they marched in a dead straight line in fact tom is sure that the need to find water would have made the journey even longer so the person started here in luxor and crossed 130 miles of open desert to get here to cargo oasis and their general track regardless of how they went was to the northwest see what would be clear off the map way up here 405 miles away so what they would do almost certainly would be to go to the last water before the open desert yeah and they last water for the open desert in any direction that they would take from here would be iron more the tiny oasis of ayanamoor is an easy driveway but for the persian foot soldiers the slog through the unforgiving desert would have been a taste of things to come when they started out they might have been fairly cocky because they had a force that they knew would be able to overthrow any tiny oasis village of which they must have captured hundreds in the establishment of the of the persian empire and so this would be nothing more than a raid or a routine mission for them but they had no idea what they were up against and what they were going to face the western desert of egypt is dry even by the standards of the sahara in summer temperatures can soar above 50 degrees centigrade this is no place to be far from home after three days on the march the persians would have been exhausted i'm sure that even between cargo oasis and this point that water was already being rationed they're beginning to realize that water is running out a few palm trees in a hole with some water in it it must have looked very very good to thirsty soldiers having marched the 80 kilometers from cargo if the persian army did stop at ayanamoor there's every chance they'd have left something behind [Music] we've collected a number of pottery shirts laying around on the surface of the landscape around the oasis and these represent different types of cooking pots water jars carrying vessels for food stone in some cases painted pottery glazed pottery and these represent different periods from the pharonic really through to contemporary times to modern day it's very hard to say if they stayed here i mean they may have just watered not even camped overnight or if they did you'd probably need to excavate this area to be able to tell for sure tom has worked out the logistics of the army's stay here to be a viable source of water for such a large force i believe that the spring must have been larger to really attract them unless they were prepared to stay here for several days and make the best use of the water supply they could fill everything up to the outset give everyone a good rest let everybody tank up on water before the march started again if they did stop at this at this watering hole it may well have been the last water that the persians saw it all from aina moore onwards all food and water has to be transported for the persians this must have been a huge burden the logistics make it virtually certain that cambisi's army could not have been as vast as herodotus said fifty thousand is a great many people to take on what in effect was desert travel from one oasis to another uh because apart from watering soldiers you've got to water all the pack animals as well with decades of experience in the desert tom barn has calculated that a minimum of 3 000 tons of food and water would have been needed for fifty thousand men to survive the march to siwa as with most such figures that we get in ancient sources we have to be fairly skeptical um it's often said that um one should take off a zero or two before one actually gets to the accurate figure and that's particularly true of persian armies which are always exaggerated in terms of their size it said in other cases that millions of men took part in persian the army was probably at the most five thousand strong tom baum has a new theory which has the soldiers running out of luck and water in a place where no one has looked before he believes the persians lack of understanding of the local geography led them far to the south of their intended destination directly into the great sand sea i suspect that the persian army setting out into the desert would not really have known what was there they were at the far extreme of their empire they didn't have a very developed sense of space they didn't have three-dimensional maps and i think they probably would have had little idea of what they were finding at the other end the great sand sea stretches over one hundred 000 square miles with dunes up to 500 feet high it's one of the least known and most treacherous places on earth one of the few who have experienced it is oil prospector mike rondell it's like being in a raging ocean there is no way out there's no civilization there's absolutely no way to call and if you're stuck you don't survive it's as simple as that you can survive for two days or three days and then you don't that's it it finished [Music] gerhardt rolls in 1874 was the first western explorer to survive the journey through the dune field by the 1930s motor cars were making the first tentative forays into the great sand sea the most celebrated of the explorers was the real english patient count laszlo al-mashi he went through the great cnc i think three or four times and he knew the libyan desert and the sahara pastor's sahara and the egyptian desert i mean probably better than anybody the arabs they called him the father of sans many of the driving techniques still used by desert drivers today were pioneered by al-mashi such as reducing tire pressure to increase traction in the soft sand in the flat corridors between the dunes high speeds could be achieved but crossing the soft sand of the dunes themselves created huge problems for even the most expert drivers in the 1930s rupert harding newman was one of them and one appalling occasion in 35 when we got into a belt of dunes it took us all day to do 10 miles [Music] you've got to be careful that you don't go over the top before you know what the other side is like because you could have got into a sort of sand bit of loose sand which you wouldn't have got the car out of but going down you want to keep a car very straight and then just you get near the bottom you accelerate and we luck get out tom and gail are beginning to realize the expedition is going to be even tougher than they imagined but hard as it is in four-wheel drives on foot the 400-mile journey to siwa must have been a nightmare for the persians could combines really have risked losing an army just to attack a small oasis and its oracle it seems a crazy decision cambyses has the reputation in herodotus account of not only being a stereotypical tyrant but also being drunk and mad he even tells a story which i think we have to take with a pinch of salt which is that the persians when they're making decisions um have to think something is a good idea both when they're drunk and when they're sober i suppose um in the greek size you could say that cambise's attack on siwa was a decision that he only thought was a good idea when he was drunk perhaps he ought to wait until the morning whatever cambise's reasoning he sent his men to their deaths [Music] the early explorers gave the name the church of the spirits of the lost persian army to this rock when the wind blew the explorers fancied they heard it keen a lament bemoaning the folly of sending out men into the land of the dead as they retreat further and further from water i'm sure that the that the will of the man was beginning to break what were once men who would march and step and fife and play drums and sing and talk after a few days they'd be muted and they'd realize the grim circumstance no more jollity and they're going also into an area that that's reputed to be full of ghosts as the persians headed west into the unknown and a certain death the scribes of conquered egypt invoked the gods in all their elemental power open are the double doors of the horizon unlocked are its boats clouds darken the sky the stars rain down the constellations stagger the bones of the hellhounds tremble this is the place that king cambises army never reached the lovely oasis of siwa where they thought it should be they found instead an ocean of sand according to tom baum the persians had got their geography wrong [Music] when they set out on this expedition they've been in egypt maybe a year and they were probably unfamiliar with the with the country geographically this is what got them into trouble because any map that they would try to follow would lead them to disaster tom believes the person's inability to calculate longitude was their undoing the modern map has siwa far to the northwest of kaga oasis on a bearing of 310 degrees but in cambyse's time siwa was thought to be on the much more southerly bearing of 289 degrees slap bang in the middle in fact of the great sand sea the team has picked up salah zidane a better wing guide to help them find their way through the dunes the seemingly gentle landscape he warns can change in an instant once a sandstorm begins to blow his advice is to camp in the sheltering lee of a rocky outcrop or butte we're in this area here which is an area of alternating longitudinal dunes tom has worked out a plan for searching his chosen area for the remains of the army the 289 degree bearing coming up from cargo oasis enters the dunes right here at this point or enters the sand sea right here at this point and if the persians actually made it to this point and believe they should continue on a little bit further along that bearing that would put them in this quadrangle and this quadrangle is sort of a natural cul-de-sac it would draw them deeper and deeper into the sand sea without them really knowing it how do you intend to do it tom i mean how do you see us i believe the best thing to do is to roar down the dune corridors and do essentially what is butte hopping go from butte to butte circle the butte looking for pottery remains or other or other a loclinus fragments that people have brought in and whenever we find something get out and take a look at them [Music] [Music] i don't think that the army died in one big plop in one area with just piles of bodies and and everything that was left what we're more likely to find than anything in the time that we have are places that they stopped on route where they can't briefly walid we want to circle those buttes over there it is beautiful isn't it isolated hills tom is sure that cambise's army like the team themselves would have camped or rested in the shelter of the buttes you always want to know where you've come from and where you're going this is something to me that's very human and so buttes would be a natural place to hole up for your your morning drink of water or your campsite at night not only because they offer shade and shelter from the wind but also because there's something more homey about abuse than there is about some barren flap that's radiating heat waves one of the things tom hopes to find are the remains of water jars that cambyse's soldiers would have carried i imagine most of their water was carried in gerber's which are water skins they would also have a tremendous amount of crockery with them and if any of this was used for carrying water it would be discarded as the water was exhausted in the 1930s almashi hoped that this pile of ancient water jars found beside a butte would prove that cambisi's army passed this way but analysis of them proved inconclusive one of the fascinating things about does it is that when when something is dropped it just stays there forever because life a it's very dry there's no one particularly to pick it up and carry it away because the first person who went there is probably you're probably the second person since he was there and things just are frozen in time in the vastness of the western desert even huge objects can lie undiscovered for years despite intensive searches the us bomber the lady be good crashed here in 1943. it took 15 years to find her [Music] when such parties eventually arrived they found the wreck remarkably well preserved so too many miles away were the bodies of the crew they died with their boots on just like the persians perhaps one of the most frightening things uh regarding a forced march on foot for the common soldier would be that they never knew where they were going they never knew how far it was to their objective and that that must be very frightening well as they're starting to run out of water they're becoming more and more apprehensive the apprehension turning to alarm that turning to fear and finally panic you can picture extreme cases of what might happen men might be slaughtered so that people would drink their blood or cut open their bladders and drink their urine anything to get any moisture as the end comes madness would take over urine might help them for a while but the blood would be deadly because it's so salient but i can easily imagine this happening with the army already weakened by first the great sandstorm described by herodotus could have been the last straw when the men had left oasis and in their march across the desert had reached a point about midway a southerly wind of extreme violence drove the sand and heaps over as they were taking their midday meal so that they disappeared forever in ancient times cataclysmic weather was seen as the work of the gods the oracle of siwa was reputed to house a sacred stone which when touched by the priests would unleash a sandstorm against its enemies prime amongst them the army of king cambises is notorious for his supposed acts of sacrilege his violence against temples in egypt and that is seen in the sources very clearly um as being a pattern of crime that has to be punished and i think the sandstorm is being implicitly seen as divine retribution attacks on the oracle get met with this kind of response if you've never been in the desert in the sandstorm you it's very difficult to imagine what it's like you can't see you can't breathe and there's a hell of a wind and you know that if you stay still you will be buried in a very very short space of time you're being sandblasted if you look what sandblasting does to a bridge and paintwork it does that to you and your face in your eyes and you can't you can't really breathe you feel you're being drowned and if you lie down the sand piles up against you and if a sandstorm goes on as it can do for two or three days you're dead and buried i mean that's it's very very quick and not particularly pleasant way to go i think it's perfectly possible that an army could be wiped out by a sandstorm comparative material suggests that these are fairly terrifying events and it gets to a great temperature in the desert in those kind of circumstances with a south wind blowing so it's by no means impossible once covered by sand it's possible for bodies to survive well preserved for centuries indeed millennia this is the perfect environment for preservation of organic and inorganic material merely because it's so hot and dry the body for example the drain have fluid fairly rapidly and become naturally mummified if we happen to find the army or part of the army there could very well be preservation of bodies in the 1930s rupert harding newman's expedition uncovered a well-preserved skeleton not evidence of cambici's army it turned out but the even more ancient body of a woman perhaps 5 000 years old so we had left excavated she had offshore necklace on our wrists and on her ankles and on her tummy she had a complete belt we eventually found she'd had eight and a half pound weight of water shelf beads on her after a day and a half of fruitless search tom and gail stumble upon their first bones how long do you think it is oh it's very difficult to tell how long it's been actually depends on the weather conditions and the environment of the time yeah but he's used for seeing such things from different errors yeah but he might be used to seeing such things but you can't say it's one or two hundred years old because it's older than he is i just don't think that you can look at the bones and say give a chronological age merely because it does depend on the weather so let's drive to the front maybe find the rider okay let's do that it's funny sometimes you go long stretches without finding any bones or anything even geologists which i am go long stretches without finding any fossils but and then sometimes you have a bonus of them and who knows on walking back to the car we might spy something you can never tell [Music] a full search of even this small part of the great sand sea would take months running low on time and with only a dead camel to show for their efforts the team retreat to the nearest oasis for the time being tom's search area is keeping its secrets the team turned their thoughts to the move north towards the hidden valley where dr barakat uncovered the arrowheads daggers and human bones which he thinks are the remains of cambise's army i'm not sure about ali's location i've got no idea what to expect the photographs we saw in cairo were very tantalizing i think just the word i would use it's actually something tangible something that has been found whatever he's found it's of interest it may be an islamic cemetery from the middle ages it may be an out a garrison of roman soldiers or it may be a remnant of the persian army there's just no way to tell until we're actually at the spot [Music] if dr barakat really has found the army then it seems the persians didn't get their geography wrong after all the place where they perished would show that they were on the right route to siwa but poignantly died just short of safety dr barakat's discovery places cambyses warriors amongst almost impossible dunes even today only the most powerful vehicles stand a chance of penetrating them the egyptian archaeological expedition failed to get through tom and gail may be the first to find the extra evidence that could prove dr barakat's sensational claims we're following a pair of tracks it could well be ollies we're headed straight in the direction it's supposed to be 370 meters ahead of us it should be just right over this hill 160 that's a short nine iron carbons yeah this is it yes this is the very same place yeah yeah that looks like his photograph doesn't it looks very much like his photograph right on it tom and gail must compare the landscape with the photographs given them by dr barakat in order to locate the exact spot of his discoveries now this is the place all right there's a huge boss of rock there that sticks out sort of an eye in the middle of it ali barakat probably took his photograph from almost exactly where i'm standing he specifically pointed out this undercutting ledge as a place where they found a great great amount of material and he described it to me as millions of bones that he thought were all of animal origin until he started finding human skulls instead of mounds of human skulls however the team finds an ancient pot gail is intrigued by the discovery but there's not much to go on and there's a small piece of black paint here remnants of a design on the side but the part is not distinctive enough to be dated on the spot so we still have our work cut out for us but it is interesting that we found something in ollie's area fairly rapidly clearly somebody was here with a pot either full of something or emptied of something [Music] the wind is beginning to pick up salah is anxious that a storm is brewing there's only just time for gail to identify where the arrowheads were found yeah there are the stones there in the first quarter see the size of the hole by the size of the metal detector our head's obviously not here anymore and i believe that it's gone off to cairo hasn't it yeah all the objects so essentially that's their first pit there are only animal bones to be seen there's no sign of the piles of human bones and skulls as described by dr barakat so do you think a sandstorm is coming time look at the horizon no okay as the wind increases in intensity the team heads back to the relative safety of the campsite it was near here in 1935 that laszlo al-mashi the real english patient nearly died of thirst when trapped by a sandstorm that raged for eight days and nights hello this is for ali barakat yeah ali barakat tom is anxious to call dr barakat as his claim that he found human bones is now in doubt hello ali this is tom how are you we're we're in the middle of a sandstorm yeah you told me that you found human skulls where did they come down to the north west as night falls and conditions deteriorate the team speculates whether it was a storm like this that did for the army i'm not sure that five thousand men could be completely covered in sand i'm still not convinced i don't believe they were i believe that they come to this area perhaps and they're hit by a very violent sandstorm god knows how many of them are left i can see a sandstorm of that magnitude on exhausted men who are dying of thirst breaking them up into groups disorienting them and eventually not burying them all you know on a huge sandstorm now that's that's uh too apocalyptic but but uh certainly playing a major role in the destruction of them i still want to go back to ali's site oh i do too tomorrow morning by morning the sandstorm has blown itself out they return to the site of ali's discoveries with his new directions they locate some bones straight away and they are human well i've got two fragments of two long bones the um thigh bone and a bone of the lower leg essentially along with a piece of occipital over there and there's a piece of the jawbone so essentially this body is not in situ i don't think it's a burial could it be someone who crawled under here and died here no i don't believe that um merely because i'm just too suspicious of the the runoff here from the upper area gail believes the bones have merely been washed down under the ledge from a burial above but tom is not convinced i'm kind of a romantic i'd like to believe that this is a persian soldier some poor soul who crawled under here to get his last bit of shade before expiring the team splits up to look for the great numbers of human bones described by dr barakat tom is quite keen for it to be a soldier from the persian army but you know it could possibly be a bedouin it could possibly be modern no bone out here that is identified as human is necessarily the persian army on a last look round tom has made a new and exciting discovery it's like another piece of skull a couple of pieces this one here one over there it's obviously been out here a long time because you can see the surface of the skull is starting to erode and crack and weather away well tom we've got another one over here further fragments of bone and skull are scattered all around it's not an army but it might be a group of stragglers we've got skull scatter here over the hill and there's stuff under the rock cut ledge so uh it doesn't make any sense to me at the moment gail still doubts whether the discoveries have much significance but tom is far more confident that their fines vindicate dr barakat and that this is the last resting place of king cambise's arm if indeed we have found some tiny remnant of that army and that is proven i think it would be a phenomenally interesting contribution to ancient history i think if evidence were found that confirmed toronto's story it would be one extra little brick in the wall to prove that he was in fact quite reliable that his sources weren't just any old hearsay one extra little brick in the wall to support herodotus credibility and his reputation as the founder of history the weapons which could be the first concrete evidence that the tale of cambise's lost army is true are now in cairo apparently dr barakat handed them over for expert scrutiny at the headquarters of egypt's supreme council of antiquities ever since then official silence has reigned to try to find out what's going on tom and gail head to the ministry of culture the minister's archaeological advisor says the fines must be somewhere in the system but his first reaction is to be doubtful about their significance this looks like a knife or a dagger and this looks like an arrowhead okay they could be from the army of campus that could be from any army beginning from the most ancient from the bronze ages if you like until let's say 300 or 400 years ago so you cannot really judge you know these things this without having the context regardless of their lack of context it would be possible for someone who is an expert in persian weaponry to look at the objects and determine whether or not they are of persian origin they might be 100 persian but even though i find that persian i still have no question marks how did they come what are they part of what's the critics they have found there's so many questions you can ask and i'm afraid the answers will be just mere conjecture the british museum in london houses a world famous collection of ancient persian weaponry as a result perhaps nobody is in a better position to assess dr barakat's discoveries than curator dr john curtis he examines the photograph of the dagger first it's in rather bad condition i'm afraid it's heavily corroded i think it is possible that it could be a short sword of persian date to really be conclusive about this i'd need to actually have the piece in my hands and be able to examine it now these bronze arrowheads are extremely interesting they're of a type um that we call um three winged and arrowheads like this actually are very common in the persian period and indeed they were probably standard issue um to the uh to the persian army um i've got some examples here absolutely the type that we would expect the army of cambyses to be using and they're exactly the same as the ones in the photograph is one of the greatest mysteries of the ancient world which has inspired generations of desert explorers on the verge of being solved at last we have the most promising new leads to come about in a century in terms of looking for the lost army and i think that all these spines should definitely be followed up on somebody needs to mount an expedition go back to the sites do some excavations there is something there you

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 763,592

Keywords: ancient history, classical history, ancient civilisations, classical antiquity, history documentary, classical documentary, persian history, king cambyses II, historical mysteries, ancient mysteries, lost army of cambyses

Id: nP5ovMPXvl0

Length: 48min 50sec (2930 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 09 2021