ABSTRACT
The name of Charles Masson (1800–1853) towers high amongst numerous amateur antiquarians of the nineteenth century who traversed through the land north of Punjab and discovered sites and antiquities belonging to the ancient kingdoms of the Indo-Bactrians, the Indo-Greeks, the Kushanas and several other dynasties. Between 1833 and 1838 Masson explored or excavated nearly fifty monuments in the vicinity of Peshawar and Kabul and amassed a staggering number of antiquities. These included a large number of coins, of which the British Museum received a substantial share. Other recipients of Masson’s coin collection were the Asiatic Society, Calcutta [Kolkata], Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The story of Masson’s antique-collecting escapades in Afghanistan during the years preceding the First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–1842) and the subsequent dispersal of his fabulous collection of antiquities, which included seals, beads, ingots, weights, ornaments, plaques, sculptures, reliquaries (caskets, boxes and bowls), arrowheads, discs, amulets, buttons, etc., together with an estimated 60,000 coins, in various museums of India and England, lie scattered in the official archives of the British East India Company, as well in his private correspondence. Based on these archival sources, this chapterpresents a coherent narrative of the coins discovered and collected by Masson and how his discoveries galvanised the efforts of his contemporary, James Prinsep (1799–1840), in deciphering the ancient Indian scripts.
