Masson was born James Lewis, a young man with no money or education and therefore no prospects. So he joined the army of the British East India Company. What makes the book especially fascinating is that there is any story to tell at all. … Masson had found the crossroads of the ancient world.” … Masson found ivory from India, coins from the Tang dynasty, silver from Constantinople and delicate Roman seals carved from red Chinese amber. He didn’t just find a lost city – his explorations revealed that what started as a small military outpost quickly became “a multicultural world beyond the imagination of most nineteenth-century scholars. Most important, he found the ancient city of Alexandria Beneath the Mountains, which had been established by Alexander the Great some 2,000 years earlier. This was, Richardson notes, “a world changing discovery: equivalent to finding the earliest known depiction of Jesus.” He unlocked the extinct language known as Kharoshthi, and he found the Bimaran golden casket, which contains the earliest known datable image of the Buddha. In roughly a decade of work, Charles Masson was the first European to discover the ruins of Harappa in Punjab (now part of Pakistan) and to explore the giant Bamiyan Buddhas. As brilliantly described by Edmund Richardson in “The King’s Shadow: Obsession, Betrayal, and the Deadly Quest for the Lost City of Alexandria,” Masson’s research in Central Asia made him one of the most important scholars of his time. We must add the heretofore obscure Charles Masson to that list.
Some 60 years later, Basil Brown uncovered the Anglo-Saxon burial site at Sutton Hoo in England, a discovery that has been called “one of the most important archeological discoveries of all time.” In the 1870s, Heinrich Schliemann found the ancient city of Troy described in Greek literature. Amateurs sometimes make astonishing archeological discoveries.