The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World
Author(s): William Dalrymple
The Golden Road: 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.
Major religions that rose to dominate Earth's largest continent. Trade networks that stretched from Japan to Hadrian's Wall. Innovations such as the numeral system and the very concept of zero, laying cornerstones for all of mathematics and science to come.
Music, dance, and visual arts of stunning sophistication: premodern India gifted all these and more to the world. Yet today, obscured by the dominance of China and other powers, the subcontinent's extraordinary part in global history as the economic, spiritual, and cultural hub of Asia is too often overlooked.
In The Golden Road, revered historian William Dalrymple corrects the record, telling the captivating story of ancient India's ascent through a swift and breathtaking tour of the ideas and places Indians created. Treks into the sunless depths of cave monasteries illuminate the origins and spread of Buddhism. Far-flung archaeological expeditions - from the sand-blown Red Sea coast of Egypt, to Afghan mountain refuges, to verdant Cambodian jungles - reveal the impact of Indian commerce.
Drawing on a lifetime of scholarship and acclaimed narrative skill, Dalrymple paints a vast canvas populated by merchants and monks, surgeons and sculptors, astronomers, kings, queens, missionaries, and more. The result is an unforgettable book - part historical epic, part globe-hopping present-day travelogue - that reasserts India's pride of place among the great pillars of human civilization.
Product Information
Bestselling historian William Dalrymple reinstates India as the great superpower of Ancient Asia.
William Dalrymple is one of Britain's great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King. 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 and Brown. 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 farm outside Delhi.
General Fields
- :
- : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- : 28 August 2024
- : h234mm x w153mm
- : books
Special Fields
- : William Dalrymple
- : Paperback
- : English
- : 496
- : HB
