The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World by William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury, September 2024) is an amazing book.
The Golden Road was the sea route across the Indian Ocean. Indian sailors realised that for 6 months of the year they could travel with the monsoon winds behind them and that for the other 6 months the winds could take them back. So from the first century CE they crossed to the Red Sea and traded with the Romans, who taxed the trade. They made a fortune, at one stage enough to pay for the running costs of a third of the vast Roman Empire.
The traders brought larger quantities of goods than possible by land routes and did it much quicker. They had materials from both India and Asia. The Romans particularly wanted both Indian fabrics and pepper. The spice was incredibly popular and expensive, it spread all over the empire, some was even found at Hadrian’s wall. For this the traders got gold, in vast quantities. This is why the writer calls it the Golden road.
India
The author uses this to show how India got to this point. The Indians had developed a great knowledge of science, hence great ships, navigation, maths and astronomy. He goes back to Buddhism, and its huge schools, with thousands of pupils, and great libraries, the most important being Nalanda. As Buddhism, and other Indic religions, spread all over Asia, scholars came to study in these places.
These schools developed mathematics, including algebra, and particularly developed the concept of 0. This led them to develop tables, with 10 numbers and thus decimalisation. They also developed astronomy. They worked out that the earth was spherical, rotating on its own axis, and had an accurate assessment of the solar year, all well ahead of everybody else. They also had a particular architecture.
The emperor of China sent delegates and then placed Indian mathematicians in his court. Buddhism spread and also to some extent Hinduism, which later overtook it in India. The result was even more centres of learning all of which usually related to India as the source of knowledge.
Open Cultures
All of these societies accepted other religions, and cultures. The sea trade with the Romans was so profitable that they managed to assuage the desire for gold. But when the Roman Empire weakened, in the 4th century, they looked for sources in Asia, like Thailand, Sri Lanka, and further afield.
Alongside trading guilds, Brahmins and other religious figures went east in to Asia. This led to the biggest Buddhist complex in Java, and the largest Hindu complex in Angkor Wat. Just to show how far Asia was ahead at this time the Angkor Wat city area had a million inhabitants. Chinese cities were also huge, whereas London’s population numbered tens of thousands. They were also spreading geography, medicine, law, printing, and hydraulics from Cambodia. Slaves were also traded. Transnational trade spread diseases.
In the 8th century a delegation went to the Abbasids of the emerging Arab empire, this strengthened their interests in astronomy and particularly mathematics. They were either able or willing to read Sanskrit and have the Indian documents translated. It was the Arabs that further developed algebra, and utilised the Indian mathematical tables.
This spread it through the Arab empire and it was only through Andalucía, that it finally came to northern Europe in the 12th century. Many other things such as metalworking techniques were spread through this route.
A big book
This is a big book, and every chapter is eye-opening. You should read it if you have any interest as to how civilisation developed from the East to the West.
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