FROM THE AWARD-WINNING, BESTSELLING AUTHOR AND CO-HOST OF THE CHART-TOPPING EMPIRE PODCAST - A REVOLUTIONARY NEW HISTORY OF INDIA
'A master storyteller' Sunday Times
India is the forgotten heart of the ancient world
For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilisation, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific.
William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India's oft-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. For the first time, he gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to the Buddhism of Japan, from the trade that helped fund the Roman Empire to the creation of the numerals we use today (including zero), India transformed the culture and technology of its ancient world - and our world today as we know it.
'At the forefront of the new wave of popular history' Observer
'A superb historian with a visceral understanding of India' The Times
For most of its modern history, India was fated to be on the receiving end of cultural influence from other civilisations. But this isn't the complete story. A full millennium earlier, India's major cultural exports - religion, art, technology, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, language and literature - were shaping civilisations, traveling as far as Afghanistan in the West and Japan in the East.
Out of India came pioneering merchants, astronomers and astrologers, scientists and mathematicians, surgeons and sculptors, as well as the holy men, monks and missionaries. In The Golden Road, legendary historian William Dalrymple highlights India's oft-forgotten position as a crucial economic and civilisational hub at the heart of the ancient and early mediaeval history of Eurasia.
From Angkor to Ayutthaya, The Golden Road traces the cultural flow of Indian religions, languages, artistic and architectural forms throughout the world. In this ground-breaking tome, Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to reinstate India as the great intellectual and philosophical superpower of ancient Asia.
