On September 20th, 1924 Sir John Marshall published his story A FORGOTTEN AGE REVEALED in The Illustrated London News that announced the discovery of the ancient Indus civilization to the world for the first time. But he did not know how old the new discoveries and writing discovered in Harappa and Mohenjo-daro was. He asked readers for help. One of them, an Oxford professor, wrote a Letter to the Editor that told the astounding truth and pushed back our understanding of Indian history by 2,000 years. Sir John Marshall was the Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, and had been overseeing excavations by two Indian archaeologists at two mysterious sites, one in Punjab, the other in Sindh over the past three years before concluding with his colleagues that they had made a major discovery worthy of announcing to the world. We are in the process of describing the first excavations at Harappa, season by season, in the words of Daya Ram Sahni and M.S. Vats who led work there during the 1920s and 1930s which has contributed so much to our knowledge of this enormous Bronze Age civilization.

This slide set shows all black and white and sepia images in that original story and the Letter to the Editor the following week that offered the first dates for the Indus civilization. The Illustrated London News was a leading pictorial weekly at the time and Marshall's strategy, while criticized later for using a London paper to first announce discoveries in India instead of a local newspaper, worked.