The Golden Road Quotes

“Although the King has a south Indiansounding Sanskrit name, his grandfather, the chief credited with founding
the dynasty, is clearly indigenous Javanese: he is called Kadungga,
implying that the same family dynasty continued to rule while changing
their names and court language. The transformation, in other words, came
not with the sword or conquest but peacefully, possibly with intermarriage,
as local chieftains took on the Brahmins’ new religion and, with it, new
Hindu names, titles and rituals. The adoption of Indian practices, in other
words, came voluntarily over generations, with conversion and influence,
and not by conquest and military subjection, as earlier Indian historians
once believed.”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“Whatever their DNA contribution to the region, the Brahmins did bring
with them from India three crucial gifts that proved irresistible right across
the region: Sanskrit, the art of writing and the stories of the great Indian
epics.
No Indian import had a deeper or more long-lasting impact than the
deeds of the heroes of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. From the fifth
century, right on through to the dance and shadow puppetry of the present
day, these would remain a major feature in the art and culture of South-east
Asia.26 In time, even the landscape of South-east Asia began to be renamed
under the influence of the great epics and the stories of their respective
heroes, the Pandava brothers and Lord Rama.
The earliest inscription in Khmer territories dating from the fifth century
records that a ruler in what is now Laos took the Indic name Devanika and
the grandiose Sanskrit title Maharajadhiraja, ‘King of Kings’. This
happened during a ceremony when the King installed an image of Shiva
under the lingam-shaped mountain that towered over his capital of
Champasak. There he consecrated a tank which he named Kurukshetra,
after the plain to the north of Delhi where the great battle of the
Mahabharata was fought”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“The archaeologists who made the study noted that ‘Southern Indian
ancestry was estimated at 42–49%’ for the Cambodian individual whose
remains they were studying. They identified ‘Irula, Mala, and Vellalar’ caste
types as the most likely South Asian contributors to the ancient individual’s
genome. These are all specifically low-caste non-Brahmin groups. It
appears that we are dealing with the emigration of a large and socially
varied group of Indian individuals, leading to intermarriage with
Cambodians and the emergence of mixed-marriage families.
This implies a varied mercantile diaspora rather than just the boatloads of
literate Brahmins who record their own presence on inscriptions. It also
helps explain the presence of non-Vedic, non-Brahmanical Tamil folk and
village guardian deities like Aiyanar turning up from the beginning in
shrines across the region, where he seems to have been worshipped as the
Protector of Travellers and the Night Guardian of Reservoirs”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“Though Harsha was himself a Hindu, and had recently established a
forerunner of the great Kumbh Mela on the banks of the Ganges, he was
also a generous patron to the Buddhists, especially those of Nalanda to
whom he had given an enormous brass image as well as more than a
hundred villages as an endowment.”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“Within a few centuries, a hybrid Indo-Islamic civilisation had emerged out of the meeting of these two worlds, along with hybrid languages, such as Deccani and Urdu, which mixed the Sanskrit-derived vernaculars of India with Turkish, Persian and Arabic words.”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“Several of the early Turkic sultans were energetic iconoclasts and made a point of building their mosques from the rubble of destroyed temples, in some of which can still be seen the defaced sculptures of their Hindu and Jain predecessors.”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“A similar fate awaited the nearby monastery of Vikramashila, which had become the leading centre of Tantric Buddhist scholarship. By the thirteenth century ‘there were no traces left, the Turushka soldiery having razed it to the ground and thrown the foundation stones into the Ganges”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“These conquests were often marked by violence and the destruction of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist sites. In what would become the capital of the new Delhi Sultanate, the slave general Qutb ud Din Aibak destroyed as many as twenty-seven temples before building the Qutb Minar.”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“In the eighth century, the first mosque in South Asia was built by the Ummayyad conquerors near the mouth of the Indus at Banbhore, not far from Karachi airport today. This was a frontier between the Islamicate and Indic worlds which stayed in place for 300 years.”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“You, my Master, Michael Scot, most great philosopher, wrote to my Lord [Frederick II] about the book on numbers which some time ago I composed and transcribed to you … I have given the complete doctrine of numbers according to the method of the Hindus, which method I have chosen as superior to others in this science … [Now] complying with your criticism, your more subtle examining circumspection, to the honour of you and many others, I with advantage corrected this work … Further, if in this work is found insufficiency or defect, I submit it to you for correction.68 Fibonacci need not have worried. The 1228 edition of Fibonacci’s manuscript was enthusiastically copied and recopied”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“This was in turn related to the Golden Ratio, which Fibonacci realised was something which kept reappearing in nature: the spiralling of the chambers of the nautilus shell, for example, obeys this ratio.59 Although Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci contains the earliest known description of the sequence outside India, the sequence had been described by Aryabhata as early as the sixth century.”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“By the end of the eleventh century, the Spanish Christian Reconquista of al-Andalus was well under way, and the westward frontier of the Islamic world was in retreat. As a patchwork of small Christian kingdoms began to be established south of the Pyrenees, many Spanish (or ‘Mozarab’) Christians educated in Córdoba, Toledo and Granada began emigrating into the Christian bridgeheads in northern Spain, bringing with them many of the luxuries and discoveries that the Arabs had introduced: lemons, Seville oranges and sugar cane, as well as cotton and mulberries for silk farming. They also built sophisticated gardens and the irrigation systems”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“It took nearly 300 years, but the intellectual treasures gathered by the Barmakids in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad had finally made their way to the extremities of western Europe.”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“It was when first Toledo and then the rest of Spain fell to the Christian Reconquista at the end of the eleventh century, and the libraries of al-Andalus began to be accessed by scholars from the north, that these brilliant Indian ideas first made their way into Christian Europe. There they changed for ever not just ways of doing business and accounting, but ways of thinking about numbers and time, as well as physics and metaphysics.”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“The Barmakids were also genuine polymaths and their gaze extended west as well as east. To supplement the translations that they had commissioned from Sanskrit, they began to commission translations from Greek, bringing Euclid’s Elements and Galen’s On the Natural Faculties into Arabic for the first time, as well as works by Hippocrates, Aristotle and Dioscorides.54 In this way they made available to inquisitive scholars in Baghdad the most important western classical works of maths, geometry and astronomy, seeding what would soon turn into a great flowering of scholarship.”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“The second step in the full comprehension of the idea of zero took place with Brahmagupta, author of the Sindhind that would find its way to Abbasid Baghdad. He made it his job to continue and correct the work of Aryabhata about one hundred years after the latter’s death. Brahmagupta was to treat the zero symbol as a number just like the other nine, rather than merely as a void or an absence.33 This meant developing rules for doing arithmetic using this additional symbol along with the other nine.”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“Aryabhata correctly concluded, a full thousand years before Copernicus and Galileo, that the earth rotates about its axis daily, and that the apparent movement of the stars is a relative motion caused by the rotation of the earth, contrary to the prevailing view that it was the sky that rotated. What he got wrong was believing that the sun revolved around the earth rather than the other way round.”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“Mathematicians initially overcame the problem of denoting empty spaces in decimal place-value notation by drawing a space-holder dot where there was a missing entry. This was probably first tried out around 3000 bce in the temples of Sumer, not far from what would become Baghdad. The innovation was passed on to both the Babylonians and the Persians, but it was in India that the use of a circle gave rise to the present-day symbol 0 for zero. It was also the Indians who named that symbol sunya, meaning emptiness or the void, linking it to a fundamental concept in Indian Buddhist philosophy.29 From this word came the Arabic zifr and hence the English ‘cipher’.30”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“Rajendra Chola was understandably proud of his overseas military achievements and the loot it had generated, and he had it all recorded on the south wall of his Great Temple at Tanjore in 1027.”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“Very rarely do such curriculums get written down at this period; to find such great Sanskrit erudition such a long way from India is astonishing. Far from being on the periphery of the Indic literary world, Cambodia seems to have been a remarkably sophisticated centre of poetry, theatre and epigraphy, and one of the principal centres of the assiduous study and deployment of perfect Sanskrit grammar at a time when that sacred language was the universal medium of learning all the way from the mountains of Afghanistan to the distant shores of Bali.”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“There are even references to women priests officiating at Cambodian temples, and evidence that these roles passed by matrilineal descent. This was something Jayavarman II insisted upon even in the lineage of his imperial Brahmins who performed the royal inaugurations.24”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“There was one other aspect of South-east Asian life that remained untouched by Indian influence: the high status of women. In Cambodia women remained owners and disposers of property, something from which the Laws of Manu and wider Indian Brahmanical tradition excluded them.”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“Some aspects of Indian civilisation made almost no impression on South-east Asia. The caste hierarchy, for example, never crystallised in the region in the way it did in India, and ideas of ritual impurity and elaborate bans on eating with members of different castes completely failed to take root. Most South-east Asians also rejected vegetarianism and retained a particular fondness for pork.”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“the people of Funan believed that their state had been founded by a south Indian Brahmin named Kaundinya. He is said to have arrived with a javelin, or in one version a magical bow given to him by a hero of the Mahabharata, Asvatthaman, son of Drona, from whom the Pallava princes in Kanchipuram also claimed descent. A local nymph princess, Mera – from whose name the word Khmer may derive – the daughter of the local naga king, paddled out to meet him when his boat first appeared over the horizon. Kaundinya then shot an arrow into her boat, frightening Mera into marrying him. He gave her clothes to wear, and Shiva himself presided over the ceremony.”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“Angkor Wat, is on its own four times the size of the entire Vatican City. Unlike the brittle polity founded by Charlemagne, and soon lost by his immediate successors, the Khmers of Angkor ruled, for several hundred years, a vast kingdom that by the twelfth century was probably the richest and most powerful state on earth.”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“A set of Javanese bronzes bear a strikingly close relationship with an unusual eighth-century twelve-armed image of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara at Nalanda which seems to have been modelled on an original, portable figurine brought to the island by Vajrabodhi.”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“This free mixing of Hinduism and Buddhism is a striking feature of South-east Asian religion from this time onwards. As a Chinese report noted, ‘The people all learn the Brahminical writings and greatly reverence the law of the Buddha.’ The Buddha and the Hindu gods accommodated each other and often appear folded in with local religious practices including ancestor worship, fertility ceremonies, and naga and yakshi”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“Mahendravarman Pallava, who lived from 571 to 630 ce, was the third monarch of the great Pallava dynasty, which ruled much of South-east India from the third to the ninth century,”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“Material pleasures ‘are like a man who dreams of a fine house with fine gardens and luxurious delights. Yet when he awakens all of it vanishes. Distinctions of wealth and poverty”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

“Over half the world’s population today lives in areas where Indian ideas of religion and culture are”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World