to communicate with William Henry Sykes and the East India Company on the value of an archaeological survey. He provided a rationale for providing the necessary funding, arguing that the venture Following his retirement from the Royal Engineers in 1861, Lord Canning, then Viceroy of India, appointed Cunningham as an archaeological surveyor to the Government of India. He held this position from 1861 to 1865, but it was then terminated through lack of funds. Most antiquarians of the 19th century who took interest in identifying the major cities mentioned in ancient Indian texts, did so by putting together clues found in classical Graeco-Roman chronicles and the travelogues of travellers to India such as Xuanzang and Faxian. Cunningham was able to identify some of the places mentioned by Xuanzang, and counted among his major achievements the identification of Aornos, Ahichchhatra, Bairat, Kosambi, Nalanda, Padmavati, Sangala, Sankisa, Shravasti, Srughna, Taxila, and Vaishali. Unlike his contemporaries, Cunningham would also routinely confirm his identifications through field surveys. The identification of Taxila, in particular, was made difficult partly due to errors in the distances recorded by Pliny in his Naturalis Historia which pointed to a location somewhere on the Haro River, a two-day march from the Indus. Cunningham noticed that this position did not tally with the itineraries of Chinese pilgrims and in particular, the descriptions provided by Xuanzang. Unlike Pliny, these sources noted that the journey to Taxila from the Indus took three days and not two and therefore, suggested a different location for the city. Cunningham's subsequent explorations in 1863–64 of a site at Shah-dheri convinced him that his hypothesis was correct. After his department was abolished in 1865, Cunningham returned to England and wrote the first part of his Ancient Geography of India (1871), covering the Buddhist period; but failed to complete the second part, covering the Muslim period. During this period in London he worked as director of the Delhi and London Bank. In 1870, Lord Mayo re-established the Archaeological Survey of India, with Cunningham as its director-general from 1 January 1871. Cunningham returned to India and made field explorations each winter, conducting excavations and surveys from Taxila to Gaur. He produced twenty-four reports, thirteen as author and the rest under his supervision by others such as J. D. Beglar. Other major works included the first volume of Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum (1877) which included copies of the edicts of Ashoka, The