The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World
William Dalrymple
Apr 2025 · Bloomsbury US Audio · Narrated by William Dalrymple
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13 hr 54 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
Bloomsbury presents The Golden Road, written and read by William Dalrymple.
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.
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.
Bloomsbury presents The Golden Road, written and read by William Dalrymple.
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, Ind...
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About the author
William Dalrymple is the bestselling author of ten books, including The Golden Road, the Duff Cooper Prize–winning The Last Mughal, the Hemingway 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. He has written and presented three television series, and writes regularly for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the Guardian. In 2018, he was presented with the British Academy’s prestigious President’s Medal for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. Dalrymple currently cohosts the podcast Empire. He lives with his wife and three children on a goat farm outside Delhi.
William Dalrymple is the bestselling author of ten books, including The Golden Road, the Duff Cooper Prize–winning The Last Mughal, the Hemingway 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. He has writ...
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