15-1 お願いします
日本語訳を!!
In 1819,a young man named James Prinsep boarded a ship near his home in Essex,England,and set sail for India,half a world away.His father,John,had made the family's fortune manufacturing indigo there 40 years earlier,and James had grown up listening to his father's romantic stories of the faraway kand.James had raced through his educatiom as quickly as he could,eager to get to India and see it for himself.Now 20 years old and fully qualified as an architect,he was at last on his way.
John Prinsep,James's father,had brought the first Western-style coin-making machinery to India in 1780 and manufactured copper coins to make doing business easier.(Before this,each India state had made and used its own hand-stamped coins.)James got a job in Calcutta at the mint his father had estabtlished.He was good at his job.He reformed the system of weights and measures and introduced a style of coinage that came to be used by the entire country.
In his spare ime,James became interested in archaeology.His love for old coins and enthusiasm for anything to do with ancient India was contagious.Many Englishmen living in India began to study Indian history more seriously(including a young man named Alexander Cunningham,the same Alexander Cunningham who would later discover the ruins at Harappa.)Soon James had friends,both English and Indian,sending him old coins and copies of inscriptions from all over India.
James spent hours admiring the portraits of long-for-gotten kings that decorated his old coins.Some of his oldest coins dated from the time of Alexander the Great,when the Indo-Greeks ruled northern India and Pakistan.Those coins had inscriptions in ancient Greek on one side,which he could decipher.But the meaning of the inscriptions on the other side,which were written in a mysterious squiggly alphabet scholars called Brahmi,baffled him.He thought they probably repeated the Greek information,but until someome could read Brahmi,there was no way to be sure.
