Forgotten Civilizations: The Rediscovery of India's Lost History

Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Western world had very little knowledge – or an extremely distorted view – of the glorious and fascinating history of the Indian subcontinent. With little of its 3000-year-old heritage formally preserved or documented, by the time the British first arrived in the region, initially for trade, dynasties like the Guptas and the Mauryas had been erased from popular memory, Buddhism as a religion had almost ceased to exist in the land of its birth, and for the ordinary citizen of the country its history began with the reign of the Mughals.

Forgotten Civilizations brings together the stories of fifteen British civil servants who dedicated their lives to rediscovering India's ancient heritage and took their findings to the rest of the world. From William Jones who identified Chandragupta Maurya as Sandrokottos from Greek sources and set the first chronological point of reference for recorded Indian history to Charles Wilkins who designed the first typeface of the Bengali script; from Henry Colebrooke who shone light on the wonders of ancient Indian scientific knowledge to Alexander Cunningham, the father of Indian archaeology, who led the first excavation of the Harappa site in Punjab – this fascinating volume of vignettes of the eminent, erudite men who decrypted, explored, unearthed and documented India's past anew takes readers on a thrilling journey through the rediscovery of the country's lost histories.