From the award-winning bestselling author and co-host of the chart-topping Empire Podcast comes a revolutionary new story of India.

India is the forgotten heart of the ancient world.

For one and a half millennia, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilization, creating a vast empire of ideas around itself. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics, and mythology left a mark on the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific.

William Dalrymple draws on a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India's often-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. For the first time, he names this influence of Indian ideas that changed the world. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to Buddhism in Japan, from the trade that financed 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 modern world as we know it.

“At the forefront of the new wave of popular history” - Observer
“A superb historian with a deep understanding of India” - The Times.