The Silk Road, a collective of overland trade routes from China to the Mediterranean, is currently having its moment in the sun. But according to William Dalrymple in his magisterial The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, that trade pales in comparison to the cascade of spices, gems, religious and cultural ideas, and cosmological and mathematical discoveries that flowed from India across the globe on ships vast enough to transport elephants, tigers and other precious cargo.
From 250 B.C. to 1200 C.E., Dalrymple writes, India created an “empire of ideas,” an “ ‘Indosphere,’ where its cultural influence was predominant.” The Indian peppercorn, for example, became a mainstay spice for Roman legions in Britain and caused grumpy Pliny the Elder to grouse about its taste and to complain that the pepper trade was depleting the Roman treasury; grains of Indian pepper were even discovered in the nose of the mummified body of Pharaoh Ramses II!
Taking advantage of powerful monsoon winds, Indian merchants traveled swiftly away and, after a seasonal interval, home. India of this era was the source of rhubarb and chess, the concept of zero, accounting systems and accurate calculations of planetary orbits. Along with the merchants and their goods came their religions and ideas. Dalrymple tracks the spread of Hindu thought and practice to the rest of the East and notes that Hinduism’s largest temple, the magnificent Angkor Wat, is far from India proper. He narrates the amazing story of the terrifying Wu Zetian, the only female Chinese Emperor, who championed Buddhism over traditional Confucianism, making Buddhism China’s state religion for a while and creating “an Indic renaissance at the heart of China.”
Dalrymple is an energetic and learned historian of India, but this is the first of his books to delve into the country’s ancient history. His range is deep and wide: The endnotes and bibliography encompass more than 100 pages. (General readers will be happy for the existence of Wikipedia and search engines.) In The Golden Road, Dalrymple draws from siloed compartments of scholarship and synthesizes a new understanding of an age when “Indian culture and civilization transformed everything they touched.”
