Fifty Thousand Men and a South Wind: The Lost Army of Cambyses
In 525 BCE the Persian king Cambyses II, son of Cyrus the Great, invaded Egypt. He defeated the Egyptian forces at Pelusium in the eastern Delta, took Memphis, deposed the pharaoh Psamtik III and added the richest kingdom of the ancient Mediterranean to the Achaemenid Empire. The conquest was quick and largely conventional. What happened next is the part nobody has been able to close.
Our single ancient source for the episode is Herodotus, writing roughly seventy years after the events in Book Three of his Histories. According to him, Cambyses planned three campaigns from Egypt: one against Carthage, abandoned when his Phoenician crews refused to sail against their own kin, one southward against the Ethiopians, and one against the Ammonians, the people of the oasis we now call Siwa, deep in the Western Desert.
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