The Golden Road
How Ancient India Transformed the World
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4.6 • 8 Ratings
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
USA TODAY BESTSELLER
A Kirkus Reviews Best History Book of 2025 * A Library Journal Best Book of the Year * An NPR Book We Loved This Year
The instant New York Times bestseller and international sensation-a sparkling, soaring history of ideas, tracing South Asia's underappreciated role in producing the world as we know it.
For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilization. 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.
In The Golden Road, William Dalrymple gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world, drawing from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India's oft-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to the Buddhism of China, from the trade that helped fund the Roman Empire to the creation of the numerals we use today, India transformed the culture and technology of its ancient world-and our world today as we know it. And in this magisterial account, Dalrymple restores ancient India as a cultural and economic superpower.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In this fascinating, accessible listen, historian William Dalrymple makes a compelling case that ancient India was instrumental in shaping global civilization. From approximately 250 BCE to 1200 CE, India’s influence radiated across Asia, the Middle East, and into Europe, largely through its maritime trade routes. Thanks to its coastal location and early mastery of ocean navigation, India exported spices, textiles, and other valuables to the Roman Empire, and the resulting wealth funded major scientific advances. Like mathematics—India invented the decimal system and the concept of zero, sparking breakthroughs in astronomy, architecture, and art. Just as significantly, Hinduism, Buddhism, and other belief systems spread across Asia through Indian teachings. Dalrymple weaves all of this and more into a clear, compelling history that never feels like homework.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestselling historian Dalrymple (The Anarchy) brings a lifetime of scholarship to bear on this magisterial and energetic account, which "aims to highlight India's often forgotten position as a crucial economic fulcrum, and civilizational engine, at the heart of the ancient and early medieval worlds." Dalrymple coins a term, the Indosphere, for this zone of influence—an "empire of ideas" stretching from western China to Persia and on to the Mediterranean coasts, where "Indic ideas, art, science, languages, and religions" were ever-present. (As one seventh-century Chinese monk put it, "People of distant places, with diverse customs... generally designate the land they most admire as India.") Dalrymple foregrounds the unique ecological factors at play, noting that India lies at the center of the Asian monsoon system, where "the regularity and predictability of these winds" aided Indian vessels venturing both east and west. He offers colorful and fascinating glimpses of the period's Indo-centric interconnectedness, from Frankish kings showing off their "Sri-Lankan garnets" to an east Indian monastery that served as a kind of international school for Buddhist monks from abroad. Dalrymple writes movingly about these ancient meetings of the minds, bringing a contagious enthusiasm and a profound humanism to his descriptions of these moments of "pluralistic and syncretic interaction." This first-rate work is a must-read for any history lover.
