![\"cambyses-skulls2\"](\"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/cambyses-skulls2.jpg\" "\\"cambyses-skulls2\\"")
\nHe rode on the desert raider’s track;
\n(Ammon-Ra is a darksome king.)
\nNo man of his gleaming hosts came back,
\nAnd the dust winds drifted sombre and black.
\n(Egypt’s curse is a deathly thing.)<\/p>\n
The Persian slaughtered the Apis Bull;
\n(Ammon-Ra is a darksome king.)
\nAnd the brain fermented beneath his skull.
\n(Egypt\u2019s curse is a deathly thing.)<\/p>\n
\nHe rode on the desert raider’s track;
\n(Ammon-Ra is a darksome king.)
\nNo man of his gleaming hosts came back,
\nAnd the dust winds drifted sombre and black.
\n(Egypt’s curse is a deathly thing.)<\/p>\n
\u00a0
\nThe eons passed on the desert land;
\n(Ammon-Ra is a darksome king.)
\nAnd a stranger trod the shifting sand.
\n(Egypt’s curse is a deathly thing.)<\/p>\n
\u00a0
\nHis idle hand disturbed the dead;
\n(Ammon-Ra is a darksome king.)
\nTil he found Cambysses’ skull of dread
\nWhence the frenzied brain so long had fled,
\nThat once held terrible visions red.
\n(Egypt’s curse is a deathly thing.)<\/p>\n
\u00a0
\nAnd an asp crawled from the dust inside
\n(Ammon-Ra is a darksome king.)
\nAnd the stranger fell and gibbered and died.
\n(Egypt’s curse is a deathly thing.)<\/p>\n
“Skulls and Dust,” by Robert E. Howard<\/p>\n
“No man of his gleaming hosts came back.” Indeed.\u00a0What REH (and Herodotus) said. Verification of Herodotus’ tale concerning Cambyses’ lost army\u00a0has been a long time coming (sort of like what Howard said about the Picts and the Basques<\/a>).\u00a0The archaeological\u00a0findings of\u00a0twin Italian\u00a0brothers in the sands of the eastern\u00a0Sahara might finally solve a millennia-old mystery. Naysayers have scoffed at the veracity of the Man From Halicarnassus<\/a>, but they may have to rearrange their paradigms now.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Italian archaeologists Alfredo and Angelo Castiglioni believe they have found evidence<\/a> of the “lost army” of Cambyses II<\/a> (called “Cambysses” in the Howard poem), which force\u00a0was sent to coerce the priests of Amun\u00a0at the Oracle of Siwa in 525 BC. Located\u00a0about sixty miles south-west of\u00a0Siwa, the site is in a location where no others thought to look. Such “out of the box” thinking has produced startling archaeological discoveries in the past.<\/p>\n Herodotus claimed that Cambyses, the son of Cyrus the Great, sent an army to the Oracle of Siwa. The priests of Amun (“Ammon-Ra” in Howard’s poem) refused to legitimize the rule\u00a0of the Persian shahanshah<\/em><\/a>, so\u00a0Cambyses dispatched troops to adjust their attitude. According to Herodotus’ account, the army was overwhelmed by a\u00a0sandstorm of unprecedented ferocity before ever reaching the sanctuary of Amun.<\/p>\n Many have sought in vain for the “lost army of Cambyses,” including Count L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Alm\u00e1sy<\/a>. So many have searched fruitlessly that archaeologists and historians in recent years have tended to utterly dismiss Herodotus’ account as a “folktale.”\u00a0If the Castiglionis are correct,\u00a0everyone was looking in the wrong place. The brothers\u00a0identified a caravan route to Siwa dating all the way back to Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty. This route would have brought Cambyses’ forces in from the south-east; the back door to Siwa. A fairly sound plan if Mother Nature (or Ammon-Ra?) had not dealt Cambyses’ commanders a bad hand.<\/p>\n The idea of such a “lost army” has captivated story-tellers for\u00a0centuries, whether one counts Herodotus amongst the spinners of yarns\u00a0or not. Thomas Preston wrote a\u00a0play about Cambyses\u00a0around the time that Solomon Kane would have\u00a0first taken ship. Shakespeare apparently made reference to Preston’s take on the Persian king in Henry IV<\/em> (by way of Falstaff, one of REH’s favorite literary characters).\u00a0Others have followed suit in the hundreds of years since. Poet, author and Friend of The Cimmerian<\/em>, Richard L. Tierney,\u00a0was unable to\u00a0resist working Cambyses’ lost troops into his tale of Simon of Gitta, “The Worm of Urakhu.”<\/p>\n As\u00a0shown in the verses that begin this post, Robert E. Howard could not\u00a0withstand the lure of this tale himself. While he played a bit fast and loose with the facts as they were “known” even in his own day, Howard wrought a poem that thrums with the rhythms of the Sahara and hints at the abysses of Egyptian history.<\/p>\n At the center of\u00a0“Skulls and Dust”\u00a0stands “Cambysses,” mad as all those others whom the gods strike down. Perhaps it’s just me, but I sense almost as much of Saul of Gibeah<\/a> (as REH saw him)\u00a0about\u00a0Cambyses as I do, say, Namedides. In “The Blood of Belshazzar<\/a>,” Howard has Cambyses carry the eponymous, sorcerous jewel\u00a0of the tale\u00a0into Egypt with him, where it apparently drove him insane.\u00a0Last, but not least, the army of Prince Almuric in “Xuthal of the Dusk<\/a>” is likened to a “devastating sandstorm” before it finds itself annihilated\u00a0(save for a single Cimmerian and his Brythunian\u00a0sweetheart). The Kothian\u00a0force is\u00a0wiped out\u00a0on the edge of the southern desert by Stygians, the (partial) ancestors of the priests of Siwa.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Persian slaughtered the Apis Bull; (Ammon-Ra is a darksome king.) And the brain fermented beneath his skull. (Egypt\u2019s curse is a deathly thing.) He rode on the desert raider’s track; (Ammon-Ra is a darksome king.) No man of his gleaming hosts came back, And the dust winds drifted sombre and black. (Egypt’s curse is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[76,29,33,26,30,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-general","category-reh-and-history","category-motifs-in-rehs-work","category-news","category-other-authors","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7194"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16745,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7194\/revisions\/16745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/cambyses-army1.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"mcb-perscataphracts\"](\"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/mcb-perscataphracts2-242x300.jpg\" "\\"mcb-perscataphracts\\"")
Those commanders would have had the typical polyglot imperial Persian\u00a0army at their disposal: Babylonians, Bedouin, Levantines, Cypriots and Ionian Greeks. The armored fist of the\u00a0force would have been the Persian heavy cavalry: the cataphracts and clibanari, ancestors of all heavy cavalry to follow, whether\u00a0European knights or\u00a0Fatimid memluks. The Castiglionis claim to have found a typically Persian horse-bit in their excavations.<\/p>\n![\"Mass](\"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/cambyses-skulls.jpg\" "\\"Mass")
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n