It's been all over the media in recent days, the news that Cambyses' Lost Army has supposedly been found. Besides the fact that no tombstone has been found saying "Here lies Cambyses' army. It got lost", there are other reasons to be more than a little suspicious of this news item, and those suspicions probably need more attention than they're getting.

From Reuters.com :
===============================================================

Sinai fort may hold clues to ancient Egypt defenses
Thu May 7, 2009 12:53pm EDT

By Alastair Sharp

QANTARA, Egypt (Reuters) - A military garrison of mud-brick and
seashells unearthed in Egypt's Sinai desert may be key to finding a
web of pharaonic-era defenses at the northeast gateway to ancient
Egypt, archaeologists said on Thursday.

Archaeologists who discovered the 3,500-year-old garrison, where up to
50,000 soldiers could be posted in times of heightened tensions, say
they hope inscriptions at Luxor's Karnak temple may serve as a guide
to finding other outposts.

Scott MacPhee is certainly not the only wargamer to paint his Roman Montefortino and Coolus helmets in a nicy shiny bronze.

(from Science News by Bruce Bower)

PHILADELPHIA — Roman soldiers defending a Middle Eastern garrison from attack nearly 2,000 years ago met the horrors of war in a most unusual place. Inside a cramped tunnel beneath the site’s massive front wall, enemy fighters stacked up nearly two dozen dead or dying Romans and set them on fire, using substances that gave off toxic fumes and drove away Roman warriors just outside the tunnel.

Quickly making the rounds in the German press, a bit more slowly in English, but German archaeologists have announced the discovery of an early 3rd century (AD!) battlefield in Germany, quite a bit from the normal limes.

See the summary of news reports on Rogueclassicism and a thread with many links to German news reports and a discussion about the finds on RomanArmyTalk.

I wasn't able to attend much of the preparations on Friday. We had someone come over at home to install bathroom cupboards and the like. When I arrived on the festival terrain, it was raining. Hard. Pluvius kept this up pretty much until Saturday morning at 10, just before the Festival was to open. From then on we had pretty much unbroken nice and actually sunny weather. I actually managed to get me a red neck!

Just a quick blog today. Everyone's been very busy doing all the last minute things that have to be done before the festival can get underway. Sadly it seems that the capricious Dutch weather is not cooperating too wonderfully this weekend, but I'm sure it'll still be cool. Impressions from Thursday are below

The posts get cutouts with the chainsaw. It's a bit faster than using a hammer and chisel.

The resulting frame, a yoke consisting of a pair of posts with three crossbars.

The framework of a basic wall is up. The yokes now need to be connected by a deck on top and of course need their sides filled with planking and filled with earth. Obviously, the audience will get a good view of how such a wall was constructed this weekend!

Day three: time for some serious progress. Things speed up when you've got big earth moving equipment. The assistance came first from one man and a big drill. We needed 20cm (8") diameter post holes a few feet deep.

And despite our best efforts, we would never have been able to dig the ditch in a week with such a small team. Roughly 40 cubic meters (ca.1400 cubic feet) of earth had to be moved, so we were quite grateful that the nearby construction crew could skip over to our little project.

And this was the result: a row of post holes and an impressive gap in the ground that will need more hand work.

As is, the ditch is not deep enough, and it lacks the nasty high-angled 'v' in the middle.

At the same time, the bracing bars were finished and one of the posts had the corresponding hole cut into it to complete the mortise and tenon construction. On Thursday a chainsaw specialist will come to complete these holes and the first pairs of posts-and-bracers will be raised.

It fits!

Day two revolved mostly around the bracing bars of which there will be thirty: three for each pair of posts. They'll each end up looking a lot like a large tabula ansata. The trapezoid extensions on the ends will match the cut-outs in the posts, which will be cut on Thursday.

A few more impressions and a note: although the wall will look accurate, we're sadly lacking in cohort-sized manpower, so we have to take a few modern shortcuts.

Preparing the cross grain cut of the trapezoid extensions on the bracers. A circular saw makes that an easy task. Jurjen (left) and Melchior de Grood at work.

Jurjen and Melchior sawing a template for the bracers.


On Wednesday the top soil and some of the ditch will be dug with some serious equipment. Jurjen and I indicated the outline of the ditch with our reproduction dolabrae and and hoe. These are based on tools found on the site and which are now preserved in the Valkhof Museum, Nijmegen.

What will this weekend be a closed off area, is at the moment freely accessible from the neighbourhood. With so many tools and equipment on site, it's essential that someone camps on the site to keep an eye on things. After our last pre-festival committee meeting, some stayed behind to enjoy the campfire and company. In the end, Jurjen and I persevered through a wet and windy night.

For the Roman festival of this weekend in Nijmegen, we (I'm part of the all volunteer organization) are building a 10 meter stretch of Roman wall and ditch. Sadly, it'll be only temporary, because of the complicated permits and regulations. Nevertheless, we'll do it right and make it as archaeologically and historically accurate as possible, materials excepted (oak would be prohibitively expensive for a temporary project). The wall will in fact be built right on the lines of the original wall of the early imperial second fort at the Nijmegen Kops Plateau(Youtube video of the digs in Dutch).