The Vanished Army: Solving an Ancient Egyptian Mystery

In 525 BC, the Persian Emperor Cambyses dispatched 50,000 of his soldiers to lay waste to an oasis temple in the Sahara desert because its oracle had spoken ill of his plans for world domination. The punitive expedition proved to be one of antiquity's most dramatic episodes of imperial overreach. One morning, while the army was taking breakfast, writes the ancient historian Herodotus in The Histories, it was set upon by "a violent southern wind, bringing with it piles of sand, which buried them." The Greek continues: "Thus it was that they utterly disappeared."