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Book Cover for: The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, William Dalrymple

The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

William Dalrymple

Reader Score

82%

82% of readers

recommend this book

Critic Reviews

Great

Based on 12 reviews on

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Current The New York Times Best Seller

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.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
  • Publish Date: Apr 29th, 2025
  • Pages: 432
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.40in - 6.20in - 1.70in - 1.70lb
  • EAN: 9781639734146
  • Categories: Asia - South - IndiaAncient - GeneralAsia - Southeast Asia

About the Author

Dalrymple, William: - William Dalrymple is one of Britain's great historians and the bestselling author of The Golden Road, the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King, and The Anarchy, a finalist for the Cundill History Prize and one of Barack Obama's favorite books of 2019. A frequent broadcaster, he has written and presented three television series, one of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA. He has also won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the FPA Media Awards, and been awarded five honorary doctorates. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting fellowships at Princeton, Brown and All Souls, University of Oxford. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and the Guardian. In 2018 he was presented with the prestigious President's Medal by the British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. He is the co-host of chart-topping podcast Empire with Anita Anand. William lives with his wife and three children on a goat farm outside Delhi.

Critics’ reviews