In the year 1800, a Scottish captain named Colin Mackenzie, an officer in the British East India Company, was traveling in the south of India. He was a curious man and an avid collector of artifacts. Over his nearly 40 years in India, he amassed a collection of 1,500 historical manuscripts, written on palm leaves in 13 languages, along with thousands of local histories and songs, charts, maps, sketches, and a collection of more than 6,000 coins. Mackenzie was also himself a skilled mapmaker, and he produced the first authentic geographical map of South India. And so we can imagine his excitement as he was traveling through the rocky landscape of the Indian state of Karnataka, when his local guides told him of the existence of an enormous ruined city nearby, that had once been the capital of a great and powerful empire.