Charles Masson (1800–1853) was the pseudonym of James Lewis, a British East India Company soldier and reporter, independent explorer and pioneering archaeologist and numismatist. He was the first European to discover the ruins of Harappa near Sahiwal in Punjab, now in Pakistan. He found the ancient city of Alexandria in the Caucasus (modern Begram) dating to Alexander the Great. He unlocked the now-extinct language known as Kharoshthi. The first book-length biography was published in 2021, Alexandria: The Quest for the Lost City, by Edmund Richardson.