India's Golden Age
Chapter 1
Story Time, Episode 4. Goes with Story of the World, Volume 2, chapters 2 and 5. About 4 minutes. Voices were made with ElevenLabs. The music box is played live by your browser. Turn Voices off to read the captions together at your own pace; each line still moves on by itself.
Where the facts come from
- Goes with Susan Wise Bauer, The Story of the World, Volume 2: The Middle Ages (Peace Hill Press), chapters 2 and 5. The story here is our own telling.
- The Gupta kings, Skandagupta's wars with the Huns, and the kingdom's decline: Romila Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (University of California Press, 2002).
- Aryabhata, place-value numerals, and zero as a number: Kim Plofker, Mathematics in India (Princeton University Press, 2009).
- The Iron Pillar of Delhi and why it resists rust: R. Balasubramaniam, Delhi Iron Pillar: New Insights (Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2002).
- Scripture: Psalm 147:4, King James Version.
- Made with: hand-written JavaScript on an HTML canvas; voices from ElevenLabs, including real child-character voices for the kids; music played live by the browser's Web Audio.