Major General Sir Alexander Cunningham KCIE CSI (23 January 1814 – 28 November 1893) was a British Army engineer with the Bengal Sappers who later took an interest in the history and archaeology of India.

Some of his collections were lost, but most of the gold and silver coins and a fine group of Buddhist sculptures and jewellery were bought by the British Museum in 1894.

[3] Through the influence of Sir Walter Scott, both Joseph and Alexander obtained cadetships at the East India Company's Addiscombe Seminary (1829–31), followed by technical training at the Royal Engineers Estate at Chatham.

Alexander joined the Bengal Engineers at the age of 19 as a Second Lieutenant and he spent the next 28 years in the service of British Government of India.

In 1845–46 he was called to serve in Punjab and helped construct two bridges of boats across the Beas river prior to the Battle of Sobraon.

[8] His early work Essay on the Aryan Order of Architecture (1848) arose from his visits to the temples in Kashmir and his travels in Ladakh during his tenure with the commission.

In 1854, he published The Bhilsa Topes, a piece of work which attempted to establish the history of Buddhism based on architectural evidence.

To the first body it would show that India had generally been divided into numerous petty chiefships, which had invariably been the case upon every successful invasion; while, whenever she had been under one ruler, she had always repelled foreign conquest with determined resolution.

[1] Most antiquarians of the 19th century who took interest in identifying the major cities mentioned in ancient Indian texts, did so by putting together clues found in classical Graeco-Roman chronicles and the travelogues of travellers to India such as Xuanzang and Faxian.

Cunningham was able to identify some of the places mentioned by Xuanzang,[13] and counted among his major achievements the identification of Aornos, Ahichchhatra, Bairat, Kosambi, Nalanda, Padmavati, Sangala, Sankisa, Shravasti, Srughna, Taxila, and Vaishali.

The identification of Taxila, in particular, was made difficult partly due to errors in the distances recorded by Pliny in his Naturalis Historia which pointed to a location somewhere on the Haro River, a two-day march from the Indus.

This site is found near Shah-dheri, just one mile to the north-east of Kâla-ka-sarâi, in the extensive ruins of a fortified city, around which I was able to trace no less than 55 stupas, of which two are as large as the great Manikyala tope, twenty-eight monasteries, and nine temples.After his department was abolished in 1865, Cunningham returned to England and wrote the first part of his Ancient Geography of India (1871), covering the Buddhist period; but failed to complete the second part, covering the Muslim period.

Cunningham returned to India and made field explorations each winter, conducting excavations and surveys from Taxila to Gaur.

[2] In his capacity as the first Director General, he carried out excavations in significant ancient towns, issued thirty volumes of archaeological papers, and assessed over 725 sites.

He is regarded as the founder of archaeology in India because: Cunningham assembled a large numismatic collection, but much of this was lost when the steamship he was travelling in, the Indus, was wrecked off the coast of Ceylon in November 1884.