Charles Masson

Charles Masson (1800–1853) was the pseudonym of James Lewis, a British East India Company soldier, independent explorer and pioneering archaeologist and numismatist.

At Ahmadpur, they were rescued by Josiah Harlan and commissioned as mounted orderlies in his expedition to overthrow the regime in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Masson was the first European to see the ruins of Harappa, described and illustrated in his book Narrative of Various Journeys in Balochistan, Afghanistan and The Punjab.

In the 1930s, the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan (Délégation archéologique française en Afghanistan, DAFA) found unexpected evidence of an earlier European visitor scribbled in pencil on the wall of one of the caves above the 55 meter Buddha at Bamiyan: If any fool this high samootch explore, Know Charles Masson has been here before[1][5] In 1841 he sailed from Bombay to Suez, crossed Egypt overland, caught a boat to France where he visited Paris, and finally arrived back in London in March 1842.

[7] Through his wide-ranging travels, Masson built up an extraordinary collection of artefacts largely (although not exclusively) from the modern states of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The project resulted in the publication in 2017 and 2021 of three volumes describing the collection and linking it to the surviving documentation, much of which is held by the British Library.