Expanding on The Golden Road

The Indian subcontinent didn’t just sit between important trade routes. In fact, it powered them. Despite how the Silk Road is mainly associated with China and Rome, substantially more Roman coins have been found in India than in China. This vast network, which William Dalrymple has called the Golden Road, linked the Mediterranean to Asia through goods and gold. The Muziris Papyrus, which was an ancient trade document written in Greek, records contracts between Roman and Indian merchants. It lists pearls, ivory, and pepper in meticulous detail. Tamil traders learned to ride the monsoon winds, turning the Indian Ocean into a rhythmic trade route. Gold traveled eastward, while spices, metals, and fabrics traveled westward; however, with every voyage also came ideas, languages, and stories that reshaped the ancient world.

The movement of goods facilitated the movement of minds. Buddhist monks and Hindu teachers traveled along the same routes that carried silks and spices. They brought with them manuscripts, relics, and philosophies. The emperor Ashoka’s missions in the third century BCE were the first wave of the intellectual exchange, when he sent Buddhist teachings to Sri Lanka and Central Asia. Centuries later, Xuanzang, a Chinese pilgrim, journeyed to India to study at Nalanda, a monastic university that had become one of the world’s greatest centers of learning. Nalanda, founded in the 5th century CE near modern-day Rajgir under the Gupta Empire, is widely considered the world’s first residential university. It housed thousands of monks and scholars whose studies encompassed far more than Buddhist philosophy. The wide curriculum of logic, grammar, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics reflected the nature of Indian intellectual life. Students would come from across Asia, including China, Korea, Tibet, and Sumatra. Instruction would be conducted in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and occasionally even foreign tongues. Xuanzang would spend nearly a decade there, debating with philosophers and recording the intensive academic culture. The existence of such an institution just shows how India’s scholarly systems invited participation from far beyond its borders.

The spread of knowledge flowed both ways: as foreign students traveled to India in search of knowledge, Indian Brahmin scholars and artisans simultaneously brought traditions outward across Southeast Asia. In royal courts from Cambodia to Java, they translated Sanskrit cosmology into local languages. Temples like Borobudur in 8th–9th-century CE Java and Angkor Wat in 12th-century CE Cambodia still carry elements of that fusion. Art and religion were often intertwined, translating sacred meanings into artistic forms. Between the 1st century BCE and the 2nd century CE in Gandhara, where Greek, Persian, and Indian cultures blended, sculptors crafted the first human images of the Buddha. The draped robes and balanced poses look akin to Greco-Roman statues, but the serenity of the expression is distinctly Indian. These statues are more than works of art; they’re records of exchange that show how material contact allowed visual and spiritual synthesis.

This world of movement and encounter is what Thomas McEvilley explored in The Shape of Ancient Thought. He saw that Greek and Indian philosophy were not isolated; in fact, they had many shared ideas. The Orphic and Pythagorean thinkers of 6th–5th-century BCE Greece, who taught about reincarnation, parallel the Upanishadic philosophers of 8th–5th-century BCE India, who contemplated the cycle of rebirth and liberation (moksha). Plato’s idea of the “One,” written in the 4th century BCE, resonates with Vedantic monism. Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360-270 BCE), who traveled east with Alexander’s army, may have encountered early Buddhist teachers whose ideas about detachment and suspension of judgment influenced his philosophy of skepticism. By the 2nd century CE, Nagarjuna’s Madhyamika school in India was using dialectical reasoning to dissolve all fixed concepts of truth, echoing themes that Greek thinkers had explored as well. These overlaps all suggest that the Golden Road carried not only trade but thought: an intellectual current that traveled both east and west.

If McEvilley maps the routes of contact, in The Wonder That Was India, A.L. Basham explains why Indian ideas were able to travel so far. Basham portrays India as a civilization built on systems of language, law, science, and philosophy. The place-value system and the concept of zero, developed by Indian mathematicians around the 5th century CE, transformed the state of global mathematics. The Aryabhatiya (c. 499 CE) laid the foundations of astronomy, which would later pass into Islamic and European thought. The Arthasastra, written sometime between the 3rd century BCE and 3rd century CE, offered a complex vision of governance and economics comparable to Aristotle’s Politics or Cicero’s De Officiis. Even in language, India’s precision was unmatched: Panini’s Sanskrit grammar, which was composed around the 5th century BCE, to this day remains one of the most sophisticated linguistic systems ever devised. These systems of grammar, mathematics, and logic formed an infrastructure of thought that would allow Indian ideas to travel and endure. When Buddhist monks traveled to China or Southeast Asia, they carried frameworks for reasoning and debate that could adapt to any culture.

Together, McEvilley and Basham give the Golden Road its full meaning. McEvilley shows where and how ideas met, and Basham reveals why they endured. You can see both forces at work in unexpected places. The same trade routes that carried Roman denarii into Tamilakam also transmitted Indian numerals westward through the Barmakid translators in 8th-century Baghdad, reaching Fibonacci in 13th-century Italy. The Golden Road, stretching roughly from the 3rd century BCE to the 8th century CE, was more than a network of trade. It was a pipeline that transmitted wealth, art, and ideas across continents.

When seen this way, the Golden Road becomes less a single route and more of a rhythm. Whether it was a monk turning Sanskrit sutras into Chinese, a sculptor blending Hellenistic realism with Indian symbolism, or a philosopher balancing logic with faith, all were participating in the same long conversation of cultures. The Golden Road was humanity’s first great intellectual commons, a space where belief, art, and science could intermingle.

In the end, gold itself remains the perfect metaphor for this situation. It flows, it transforms, and it endures. The Golden Road was built from the metals that crossed the seas, but also the ideas, symbols, and discoveries that could be shared and reshaped without ever losing their relevance. What moved along those routes was not just wealth, but wisdom. That is what truly made the road golden.