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Podcast: Commonwealth Club of California Podcast
Episode: An Empire of Ideas: How Ancient India Transformed the World, with William Dalrymple
Description: For about a millennium and a half, between 250 BC and A.D. 1200, India was a confident exporter of its own diverse civilizations, creating an empire of ideas, to a world that was a willing and eager recipient of a startlingly comprehensive mass transfer of Indian soft power. From religion such as Buddhism to mathematics that introduced the idea of zero, infinity, algebra, trigonometry to astronomy that proposed a spherical earth rotating on its own axis and trade, that Pliny the Elder complained drained the wealth of Rome into Indian pockets, Indian ideas infected the world.Â
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