The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

USA TODAY BESTSELLER

Winner of the Mark Lynton History Prize 2026 * 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.