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How Ancient India Transformed the World
The internationally bestselling author of The Anarchy returns with a sparkling, soaring history of ideas, tracing South Asia's under-recognized role in producing the world as we know it.
For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilization, 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.
In The Golden Road, 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 China, 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.
"Dalrymple's writing is always animated, enlivened by color plates that allow readers to readily envision the sights evoked here. A passionate tribute to the glories-and influence-of ancient India." ―Kirkus Reviews
"[A] magisterial and energetic account ... This first-rate work is a must-read for any history lover." ―Publishers Weekly
"Historian Dalrymple's comprehensive and meticulously researched examination of ancient India reveals momentous and ubiquitous influences.... When considered holistically, as Dalrymple does so well, it's clear that India's impacts cannot be understated and have shaped the world for thousands of years." ―Library Journal
"An outstanding new account ... The most compelling retelling we have had for generations." ―Financial Times (UK)
This information about The Golden Road was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo © 2010 Koroki Lewis
William Dalrymple is the author of six previous acclaimed works of history and travel, including City of Djinns, which won the Young British Writer of the Year Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; the best-selling From the Holy Mountain; White Mughals, which won Britain's most prestigious history prize, the Wolfson; and The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize for History and Biography. He is currently the Whitney J. Oates Fellow in Humanities at Princeton University. He lives on a farm outside of Dehli with his family.
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