India is the forgotten heart of the ancient world. In the millennium and a half from c. 250 BC to 1200 AD, Indian art, religion, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world - a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific. Today, over half the world's population lives in areas where Indian religions and culture are, or once were, dominant. Drawing from a lifetime of scholarship, award-winning historian William Dalrymple argues that India is one of the two great intellectual and philosophical superpowers of Asia. $9 vbdcul/11.2024.