The Quest for the Lost City: Edmund Richardson (1833)
Edmund Richardson, author of Alexandria: the Quest for the Lost City.
In the early nineteenth-century a hitherto unremarkable man called James Lewis who was serving as a private in the East India Company decided to reinvent himself. He deserted and ran away to the little-known but beautiful city of Kabul in Afghanistan. Once there he immersed himself in a culture that was little known to those from the West. He soon came to dedicate himself to a strange and quixotic quest. He sought to find one of the great lost cities of the ancient world: Alexandria Under the Mountains.
In this evocative and beautifully-described episode, the academic historian Edmund Richardson takes us back to the year 1833. This was, he argued, the year when James Lewis transformed from an ordinary soldier into a man called Charles Masson – a figure who would change history.
A map of several of the ‘Alexandrias’ founded by Alexander the Great. (Wiki Commons)
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In around 330 BCE Alexander the Great reached the limits of the known world – Afghanistan. On his long and violently successful journey from Macedonia he founded many new cities, a chain of ‘Alexandrias’, stretching across North Africa and Asia. Some of them flourished, others did not. They all lay in the shadow of the most successful Alexandria of all, the capital of Egypt and most important intellectual centre of the ancient world. That city survived, while the others sank into memory and then legend.
The storytellers said that when Alexander reached the foothills of the Hindu Kush, he founded another great city, Alexandria Beneath the Mountains, which became a vibrant meeting point between East and West, a melting pot of merchants, goods and ideas. This was one of a host of tales that had been told around the campfires of Afghanistan for centuries, but no one had been able to find the lost city. No one, that is, until a ragged Englishman, a desperate deserter from the East India Company army who had travelled incognito for years, fell in love with the country and its romantic stories about Alexander.
Charles Masson, who had arrived in the East as Private James Lewis, was, by now, a seasoned traveller, fluent in several local languages, embraced by everyone in Afghan society from emirs to thieves – a true inhabitant of this magical world, at home there in a way that other Westerners, with their guns and their money and their overweening sense of superiority, never could be.
Happily settled in Kabul, living on a mixture of luck, kindness and thin air, Masson began to think seriously about where Alexandria of the Mountains could be located. He knew from classical sources that it was only a few days’ walk from Kabul, having spent several years traversing the country on foot himself, he had a good idea of the range of possibilities.
The difficulty he faced, as always, was money. Excavation is a labour-intensive business, and if he was to have any chance of finding archaeological evidence he would need funds to pay for assistance and manpower. He watched several European treasure hunters pass through the region using dynamite as their primary excavation tool – archaeology has come a long way since the 1830s – but Masson knew this was absolutely not the way to go about things.
His cautious, cooperative, respectful approach to both the people and their heritage is as inspirational and relevant today as it was in his own time. Unsurprisingly, there were few in the East India Company or Britain itself who took this view, and while Masson avoided the worst punishments hanging over him in 1833, his archaeological achievements were never recognised. He eventually returned to England where he spent the rest of his life, mired in frustration and disappointment.
Masson’s period of obscurity has finally come to an end thanks to the academic Edmund Richardson who has brought Masson’s astonishing story into the light. Based on a box of papers he found in the National Geographic Library, Richardson’s book, Alexandria The Quest for the Lost City is an extraordinary tale of courage and fate, set in against the magical but brutal world of nineteenth century Afghanistan.
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Click here to order Edmund Richardson’s book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.
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Show notes
Scene One: Kabul, winter 1833. In the bazaars of Kabul - a warren of stalls and camels and shouting merchants from all over Asia - a bedraggled-looking man, dressed in shabby clothes, is listening to a storyteller. The man is called Charles Masson, and he has spent the last few years wandering alone through Afghanistan and northern India, searching for Alexander the Great's lost cities. Now, in Kabul, it seems like he has picked up the trail: the storyteller is talking about the plain of Bagram, just outside Kabul - and about mysterious ancient coins and artefacts which the locals have found in the soil.
Scene Two: Bagram, summer 1833. Masson rides out of Kabul in search of Alexander's city. It was called Alexandria beneath the Mountains, and was founded two and a half thousand years earlier. At first, his search appears to be in vain: everyone tells him that no ancient artefacts have ever been found. He's about to give up. Then, an old man brings out a single, ancient copper coin. It's like a message from another world. And it tells him that the rumours might just be true. Masson's life is about to change forever.
Scene Three: Ludhiana, northern India, autumn 1833. In the sleepy, dusty town of Ludhiana, the British East India Company's spymaster is looking over reports from his informants in Kabul. He reads about a ragged stranger, who calls himself Charles Masson, and has spent the year hunting for Alexander's lost city. The name rings a bell. The spymaster digs through his files - and he realizes that Charles Masson is not the ragged archaeologist's real name. His real name is James Lewis. He is a deserter from the East India Company's army, with a death-sentence hanging over his head. And now, the East India Company has found him.
Memento: Charles Masson’s drinking cup, symbolic of a different way of encountering Afghanistan.
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Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Edmund Richardson
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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About Edmund Richardson
Edmund Richardson is Associate Professor of Classics at Durham University. In 2016, he was named one of the BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinkers. Edmund’s research for Alexandria has taken him from the forgotten libraries of Kolkata to the back streets of Mumbai, and across the golden wasteland of the Thar Desert. The characters on the edge of most histories fascinate him - telling tales that seem a little too strange to be true, but in their truth, they change the way you see the world.
Map showing the location of the scenes in Afghanistan and India
Map background credit: Library of Congress
Visions of Afghanistan
All images from the Wellcome Collection
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Alexandria: The Quest for the Lost City by Edmund Richardson
Click here to order Alexandria: the Quest for the Lost City by Edmund Richardson from our friends at John Sandoe’s Books.
This is not the Alexandria in the Nile Delta, but rather Alexandria ‘Beneath the Mountains’, in Afghanistan, discovered by a wandering scholar and archaeologist called Charles Masson in 1833. A fantastical mix of Great Game espionage, edge-of-empire characters and politics, brilliantly told. (John Sandoe’s)
