The Gupta Golden Age

When the Maurya Empire collapsed around 185 BCE, the Indian subcontinent splintered. For over five hundred years, a revolving door of dynasties, invaders, and regional kingdoms carved the land into competing fragments. Indo-Greeks from Bactria pressed into the northwest. Scythian Shakas settled in western India. The Kushan Empire, originating from Central Asian nomads, dominated the north for two centuries, facilitating trade along the Silk Roads but never unifying the subcontinent under a single political vision.

By the early fourth century CE, northern India was a patchwork of petty kingdoms with no center of gravity. Then, in the Gangetic plain, a family of modest origins began to consolidate power through strategic marriages, military campaigns, and diplomatic cunning. They called themselves the Guptas.

The A ruling family that unified much of northern India from approximately 320 to 550 CE, presiding over a period of extraordinary achievement in mathematics, astronomy, literature, art, and philosophy. Often called India's "Golden Age," the Gupta period produced innovations — including the decimal system and the concept of zero — that would reshape global civilization. built something that lasted barely two centuries, a short run as empires go. But in that span, Indian civilization produced a constellation of intellectual, artistic, and scientific achievements so dense that historians have reached for the same word over and over: golden.