In the Steps of Alexander Sir Mortimer and Magnus

Oh, yes.

Now, you haven't done any formal archaeological

excavation for some time now.

You haven't been out with your bucket and spade.

Do you miss the business of excavation?

No. No. I did my last bucket and spade excavation in 1958.

I don't know how many years ago that is,

but I knew at the time that it was going to be my last ever.

Not only my last in India or Pakistan, but the last in my life.

And so it was.

And looking back, do you know, you must forgive this, to

my reasonable satisfaction, I think it was quite a successful goodbye.

I'll tell you about it briefly.

Let me take you first of all back to the beginning of the century,

to 1902, when I was a small boy who hadn't even a dream.

In that year, Lord Curzon was still Viceroy of India.

He decided, in 1902, to revive the archaeological survey of India,

which had...had a tentative existence of a number of occasions.

It had never really come to fruition.

He sent word back to the India Office in London,

"Send me out, send me out, a suitable archaeologist to take

"charge of this revived archaeological survey."

Well, that query, that inquiry, naturally,

went straight to the British Museum. It was the only place to send it to.

There were no archaeological departments in universities

and so on to approach.

And in the museum, the director of the period,

his name doesn't matter... What are they called?

..Trawled, for a candidate.

That is to say, he sent round circular letters to

all his departments saying, "Have you got anybody whom you can

"spare to go to India as director-general of Archaeology?"

And somebody, one of the departments,

I have a pretty good idea which, it's a long time ago,

sent in the name of a man called Marshall.

Now, the Marshall that they had in mind, I can say this,

with the proper, reasonable respect,

the Marshall they had in mind was a junior member of the staff.

Of one of the archaeological departments in the museum.

He was competent and undistinguished.

But they thought they could spare him.

So, they sent his name up to the director.

The director said, "Send Marshall to me."

Shortly afterwards,

the director was called away from his room for some purpose

elsewhere in the museum,

and there entered upon the scene a young man with an attractive,

intelligent face, called Marshall, John Marshall, who came

from the British School of Athens, he was a Cambridge man originally...

And who wanted to confer with the Director of the British Museum

with a view to his future career.

Back came the director to his room, presented...

This young Marshall was presented to him, the director naturally

thought it was the Marshall he expected to see

from his own staff, and...

He said, "Well now, look here.

"They want a man in India to look after the archaeological

"survey there. How soon can you go?"

"Well," said young Marshall, "I want to get married."

"How long will that take you?"

He said, "I could go in six weeks, would that be all right?"

"All right, I'll send word to the Viceroy that you will be

"in Delhi as soon as possible after the next six weeks."

So, after the next six weeks, they arrived in Delhi,

young John Marshall, of whom nobody ever heard, he was a student,

accompanied by his young bride. I knew them both. And...

Curzon took to him at once, he was an attractive young man,

intelligent young man.

Took to him.

In fact, every Wednesday, I was told this by Marshall himself,

every Wednesday the Viceroy would have Marshall in his office

with him so that he could hear how a subcontinent should be conducted.

What did Marshall do? You were going to ask me, weren't you?

When he got out there. I'll tell you.

He did what any new director-general...

What I did myself when I was a new director-general in India.

He went round India to meet his staff

and to see what India looked like.

And he began, as I later on began, up in the north-west corner,

what was then India, which is now India and Pakistan,

which was the natural entry into India from the rest of Asia by land.

Surrounded by the mountains which are generally hidden in mist.

The most romantic part of the area, if you use the word romantic,

which I don't.

There he found a series of mounds, one of them a very high one,

60 or 70 feet high, still there, part of it,

which represented the predecessor of the present Peshawar, the old

capital of the frontier,

which was known as Pushkalavati, in other words, Lotus City.

And, coming as he did from Greece, with the Acropolis very much

in his mind, he thought, "Here's another Acropolis.

I'll dig it up, we'll find perhaps another Parthenon on top of it."

So, in 1903, he carried out the first excavations in

modern times, but not by modern methods, I must say.

Modern methods in 1903 were hard to come by. They hadn't been invented.

But he carried out excavations there and...

To be quite frank, he made an awful mess of the job.

It was to be expected.

A young man with no training, and no training to match up to.

Well, years later, it was 1944,

I suppose 42 years later, another

English director-general began his tour in the same sort of way.

He went up to the frontier

and he went out into the great open plain which was covered with

sugarcane, great waving masses of green sugarcane

weaving like a sea, and rising out of these waves,

rather like a battleship at anchor, was this great mound which

represented the old capital city, Pushkalavati.

So, Mortimer Wheeler had himself been appointed director-general

of the archaeological survey for India in 1944.

But he had to wait 14 years before he could excavate the ancient

city of Pushkalavati.

The chance came in 1958, when he was invited back to the

frontier by the government of Pakistan.

I dug there.

But before doing so, living as I was in 1958 and not in 1902, 1903,

I had made arrangements beforehand with the Pakistan Air Force to

have an air photograph taken of the area I was going to deal with,

to see what that would show up.

I didn't think at the time, I'll be perfectly frank about it,

that much would happen.

But what did happen was this.

On the second day, my second day out there on the plain,

I was standing by the tents which we had there for workshops and

so on, when a jet fighter swooped down over my head,

almost took my hat off.

And it swung round and then almost poised like a dragonfly in the air.

I discovered afterwards, upon inquiry,

that what was happening was that the poor pilot had been told,

having been instructed in Peshawar,

to go and photograph the old city near Charsadda.

When he got there, of course, there was no city,

he didn't realise that these mounds were intended.

And he didn't know what to do.

So, he received instructions on the telephone to photograph

the area for half a mile or so around my tents.

Which they did. Which he did.

He took about a quarter of an hour, swooping about there,

and I thought, "My God, nothing will come out of this." After all,

he's going too fast to begin with to get a decent photograph.

But, but...

Next morning, a messenger came from Peshawar, from the Air Force,

with a bunch of photographs.

As I turned them over with my colleagues,

two young men from Cambridge,

another man from various parts of Pakistan, we looked through them.

And they shrugged their shoulders.

And I said, "Well, what do you make of it?"

They said, "Well, it all looks rather...

"Looks very nice, but rather muddled."

I said, "What do you make of that one?"

I held out one of them to him.

They looked again.

They were not used to this sort of thing, this sort of quiz.

So I said, "This is the greatest discovery

"made in the frontier of Pakistan for perhaps 100 years."

And then I explained.

What I saw on this air photograph was the plan of a large

part of a Greek town, a Greek city.

The lines of the streets were there,

the lines of the house walls were there at right

angles to the streets in parallel to the streets, and

there in the midst was the circular shape of the Buddhist shrine.

The whole thing was there. Nobody had ever heard of it before!

That afternoon, we went over to Shaikhan, which is

the name of this mound,

it was about three furlongs from where our tents were, and there

it looked like a tumult, rather like a cross-channel sea on a rough day.

But from the air, from 1,000 feet up,

looking down as the camera had looked down,

the whole thing fell into place and what had happened was quite simple.

The local farmers had found that there were the brick

walls of an ancient city there.

They dug lines along... Trenches along the lines of the walls,

pulled out the bricks, of course, their trenches were no wider than

the walls, otherwise they would have wasted their efforts.

And so, what they'd left for me, for the air photograph,

was a city in negative.

A city in negative, with hollow lines where the walls had been.

Well, thereafter, all of this was verified.

Two years later, two years after I'd left,

it was verified by Professor Darney,

a local professor of archaeology at Peshawar University,

who had been a pupil of mine.

A very good fellow, a very fine fellow indeed.

You see, as one gets older, one boasts of one's pupils, no doubt,

maybe, in time to come, I shall be boasting of you, Mag!

But never mind that for the moment.

He dug there, he found the walls where I had found the hollows

in the ground where the walls had been partially dug up,

and he found these coins of Menander,

right at the bottom of the whole thing, many feet down, showing

that this was in fact a Greco-Indian,

or Indo-Greek, creation

of approximately the middle of the 2nd century BC.

In the Greek tradition, following the pattern set by...

..by Alexander The Great,

when he came there at the end of the 4th century.

The place was captured by...

Charsadda, or rather Pushkalavati,

was captured by Alexander's troops in the year 327 BC.

And, as a bonne bouge,

I decided to find the defences of the city at that time

because the fact that it took a trained division,

or corps, of Alexander's troops

30 days to capture it implied that it was fortified.

I wouldn't have told you that story

if I hadn't actually found the defences.

It was up to me to find them,

and I did.

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