Part One of a brilliant study of ancient Indian civilization For about a thousand years, from around the middle of the first millennium BCE, to around the middle of the first millennium CE, India was a prosperous and marvellously creative civilization. The unprecedented economic prosperity that India enjoyed in the first half of the first millennium CE was a crucial catalyst that energized the flowering of the classical Indian civilization. In Part One of The First Spring (Life in the Golden Age of India) Abraham Eraly unfolds a profoundly illuminating panorama, covering the political history, polity, economy, society, family and everyday life, of an age that flowered luxuriantly before its inevitable decay.