Talk:Hansjoachim von der Esch

Chafetz

It's some years now, but I think this should be cleaned up: Johnhagen added a long section about the expedition of Gary S. Chafetz following Esch's Kambyses expedition. This is good to be mentioned, but shoud not take up the same space as half the rest. I'll try to reduce it to a couple of lines. If anybody has any source about it, this would be very welcome. Thanks! Ilyacadiz (talk) 14:22, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

Two years later, no movement here. I'll take out the entire paragraph about Chafetz, as it's unsourced and it is not clear if it belongs here. Chafetz is a rather obscure novelist, with no archaeological training, and besides his own book, which is categorized as "fiction" in Amazon, there is only a documentary about his expedition; the only worthwhile reference to this documentary I could find reads like this:

Susan Todd and Ned Johnsto have completed The Lost Army, a one-hour documentary that follows a National Geographic expedition to Egypt's Western Desert. The leader of the expedition is GaryChafetz, an ambitious 36-year-old novelist who has no formal archeological training.His goal:to find traces of a 50,000-man Persian Army that supposedly vanished in a colossal sandstorm in 53 5BC. Filmmakers Todd and Johnston accompanied the expedition for five months, and their point-of-view commentary forms the film's narrative thread. They start out with grand hopes of discovering the army, which Chafetz compares to the discovery of King Tut's tomb, but as the days of wandering through the desert fade into months, the expedition gradually loses its momentum. Things go wrong, and the expedition turns into abizarre, comic odyssey. The Lost Army was produced with support from the Harvard University Film Study Centerand National Geographic. The Lost Army: SusanTodd, 125W.76thSt.,#6B,NewYork,NY10023; (212)362-9714. https://independent-magazine.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/41/2014/09/independent13foun.pdf

The text somebody had put into the Von der Esch article read:

From September 1983 to February 1984, Gary S. Chafetz, an American journalist and author, led an expedition — sponsored by Harvard University, The National Geographic Society, the Egyptian Geological Survey and Mining Authority, and the Ligabue Research Institute — that searched for the Lost Army of Cambyses. Chafetz, who was apparently the first person to translate the obscure book by von der Esch, based the location of his search on the six large cairns that von der Esch reported having found in April 1939. Chafetz's six-month search was conducted along the Egyptian-Libyan border in a remote 100-square-kilometer area of complex dunes immediately north northwest of the six von der Esch cairns, south west of the uninhabited Bahrein Oasis, and approximately 100 miles south east of Siwa (Amon) Oasis. The $250,000 expedition had at its disposal 20 Egyptian geologists and laborers, a National Geographic photographer, two Harvard Film Studies documentary filmmakers, three camels, an ultra-light aircraft, and ground-penetrating radar. The expedition discovered approximately 500 tumuli (Zoroastrian-style graves) but no artifacts. Several tumuli contained bone fragments. Thermoluminescence later dated these fragments to 1,500 BCE, approximately 1000 years earlier than the Lost Army. A recumbent winged sphinx carved in oolitic limestone was also discovered in a cave in the uninhabited Sitra Oasis (between Bahrein and Siwa Oases), whose provenance appeared to be Persian. Chafetz was arrested when he returned to Cairo in February 1984 for "smuggling an airplane into Egypt," even though he had the written permission of the Egyptian Geological Survey and Mining Authority to bring the aircraft into the country. He was interrogated for 24 hours. The charges were dropped after he promised to donate the ultra-light airplane to the Egyptian Government, that subsequently was given to the Egyptian War Museum in Cairo.[citation needed]

This is probably based on Chafetz' own ('fiction') book, but it reads as if it was in some kind a argument against Von der Esch's theory. Given that Chafetz has no scientist qualifications, and that "everything went wrong", this is doubtful. If somebody wants to put all this material into the Cambyses article, that's fine, so I leave it here for copying, but as we don't even have a source to link Chafetz to Von der Esch, it does not belong here. Ilyacadiz (talk) 13:26, 29 April 2022 (UTC)