11-13-2009, 10:32 AM
Quote:....my point being that not many Persian armies numbering in the thousands set off for Siwa during that period.....How do we know? We have some evidence for the conquest (Herodotus) and some evidence for the early reign of Darius (Behistun Inscription and Wedjahor-Resne statuette). There are some papyri and ostraca; there may have been more, but the Egyptian archaeologists are not very helpful in publishing them. A temple from the Persian period had been excavated at Kharga, suggesting that the Persians had at least one fort in the western desert. That's about it. There may have been numerous expeditions into the western desert about which we do not know.
The situation is comparable to that find of that third-century battlefield in Germany (this thread). Some people have tried to connect it to this or that known campaign, but most scholars believe it belongs to a Roman expedition that failed to reach our sources. Given the extreme paucity of (published) evidence for the Persian period in Egypt, I am extremely skeptical to identify archaeological remains with one particular expedition.
