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.