His most spectacular find was the solid-gold, garnet-encrusted Bimaran casket that is now one of the British Museum’s greatest treasures. It was he who had first made known the lost Hellenistic Buddhist golden age of Gandhara by digging up what are still the earliest extant images of the Buddha. Masson had also been the first western archaeologist to visit the ancient cities of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro. The coins of Heliochles of Balkh were typical: they showed a Roman profile on one side – large nose, imperial arrogance in the eyes – but on the reverse Heliochles chose as his symbol a humped Indian Brahmini bull. They had provided the key for scholars to understand the profoundly hybrid, Greco-Buddhist ancient history of the region. The bilingual Hellenistic coins Masson had sent to Calcutta, minted by men with names such as Pantaleon, King of North India and Demetrius Dharmamita, had been like miniature Rosetta stones.
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