WORKSHOP ON

MAKING OF MUSEUM COLLECTIONS,

With Special Reference To Gandhara
(India International Centre, New Delhi, 16-17 April 2015)

Charles Masson: A Footloose Antiquarian in

Afghanistan and building up of Numismatic Collections in
the Museums in India and England
Sanjay Garg
Deputy Director, National Archives of India,
Ministry of Culture,
New Delhi 110 001 (INDIA)
sgarg30@hotmail.com
www.sanjaygarg.wikidot.com

ABSTRACT
The name of Charles Masson (1800-53) 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
amount of antiquities. These included a large number of coins, of which the
British Museum received a substantial share of them. Other recipients of the
Massons coin collection were the Asiatic Society, Calcutta [Kolkata],
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
The story of Massons antique-collecting escapades in Afghanistan
during the years preceding the First Anglo-Afghan War (1839-42), and the
subsequent dispersal of his fabulous collection of antiquities, which included
seals, beads, ingots, weights, ornaments, plaques, sculptures, reliquaries
(caskets, boxes, and bowls), arrow-heads, 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 paper would attempt to present 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, and helped museums
in India and England to build an impressive numismatic collection from this
part of the world.