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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leif, the literary editor of The Spectator, and my guest this week is the historian William Dalrymple.

Now, we hear an awful lot about the Silk Roads as the great vector of cultural exchange and economic growth in the ancient world. But Willie Dalrymple says that's all cobbler's and his new book,

The Golden Road, how ancient India transformed the world, asks us to rebalance our view of the ancient

world away from the West and away from the so-called

Silk Roads. It's out now in paperback. Willie, you describe in this book a way in which the story,

you say the story of ancient India's huge influence on the world, has been hiding in plain sight,

but it's a story that hasn't been told. Can you tell me, in what way has it been hiding in plain sight?

And why hasn't it until now been told?

I think India is one of those places like ancient Greece, like Asian China, which very early

came up with answers to the big, profound, basic questions that mankind asked. Mythologies, ideas of personal

contact, ideas of personal conduct, morality, what are we doing here? How do we live a moral life?

What's our relationship with this earth? What's the relationship with this earth with the moon,

with the heavens? Now, in the West, we know the Greek answers to those

questions very well. We grew up with, probably by the age of seven, every spectator reader

had heard about Archimedes shouting Eureka in his bath, if not five. By the age of nine or ten,

he would have heard of Pythagoras and Pythagoras' theorem.

But that's not true of equivalent figures in ancient India.

...