Zero got a job, the sky got measured, and Sanskrit literature got its high-water mark. Also the century in which a pillar was made that has refused to rust ever since.
23 entries on this part of the floor. 320 CE – 650 CE.
c. 499 CE
The jester of the Vijayanagara court in a hundred folk tales, who solved every problem by being cleverer than everyone in the room and slightly ruder about it.
Find it on the floor: The Zero Laboratory
Aged twenty-three, he wrote that the earth rotates on its axis and that eclipses are shadows, not demons. Also produced a sine table and a value of pi accurate to four decimal places, then noted, carefully, that it was approximate.
Find it on the floor: The Zero Laboratory
The first person anywhere to write down the rules for arithmetic with zero and with negative numbers — including debts and fortunes. Got division by zero wrong, which is fair, since it took another thousand years to agree it is undefined.
Find it on the floor: The Zero Laboratory
Travelled to Baghdad in the 8th century, to Europe as "Arabic numerals" in the 12th, and eventually onto every keyboard on earth. Arguably India's largest single export.
Find it on the floor: The Zero Laboratory
An encyclopaedia covering astronomy, architecture, gemstones, perfume recipes, well-digging and how to tell if it will rain. The most usefully nosy book of the ancient world.
Find it on the floor: The Zero Laboratory
From a family of dancers going back generations, he choreographed for films and taught for sixty years, and could tell a whole story with the tilt of one wrist.
Find it on the floor: The Zero Laboratory
Kings shown hunting lions, playing instruments, performing horse sacrifices. Propaganda you could spend.
Find it on the floor: The Zero Laboratory
Began as a gotipua dancer and a pakhawaj player in a travelling troupe, and ended up reconstructing an entire classical form from temple sculpture and old manuscripts.
Find it on the floor: The Zero Laboratory
Six tonnes of wrought iron, standing in the open air for sixteen centuries, essentially rust-free. The protective phosphate film that does it was only properly explained in 2003.
Find it on the floor: The Zero Laboratory
the sky, computed · upper level
Derived infinite series for pi, sine and cosine roughly 250 years before Newton and Leibniz. His school in Kerala kept the work going for two centuries and then it went quiet.
Find it on the floor: Aryabhata's Observation Deck
Rotation of the earth, the cause of eclipses, sidereal year lengths accurate to minutes, and planetary models refined for a thousand years by people watching very carefully with no lenses at all.
Find it on the floor: Aryabhata's Observation Deck
Wrote an algebra textbook as a series of poems addressed to a young woman, complete with problems about bees, monkeys and necklaces breaking. Also stated ideas that look uncomfortably like calculus, five centuries early.
Find it on the floor: Aryabhata's Observation Deck
c. 700 CE
Nalanda's library was said to occupy three buildings, one of them nine storeys high. He is the reason we know anything at all, and the fire is the reason we know so little.
Find it on the floor: Nalanda & Takshashila Stacks
Came from television news to parallel cinema and played working women — mill hands, farm labourers, journalists — with a plainness that made everything around her look staged. Died at 31.
Find it on the floor: Nalanda & Takshashila Stacks
Up to 10,000 students and 2,000 teachers, an entrance exam brutal enough that most applicants were turned away at the gate, and a nine-storey library. Burned in the 1190s; the manuscripts are said to have smouldered for months.
Find it on the floor: Nalanda & Takshashila Stacks
Argued that nothing has independent existence, including his own argument. Buddhist philosophy has not fully recovered, in the best possible way.
Find it on the floor: Nalanda & Takshashila Stacks
Set out ethics for doctors, described digestion and metabolism, and insisted that a physician who treats for money rather than for the patient is in the wrong trade.
Find it on the floor: Nalanda & Takshashila Stacks
Ashoka's daughter, who sailed to Sri Lanka with a sapling of the Bodhi tree and ordained the island's first nuns. That sapling's descendant at Anuradhapura is among the oldest human-planted trees on earth.
Find it on the floor: Nalanda & Takshashila Stacks
Sacked during Bakhtiyar Khalji's campaign in Bihar. Whatever the exact scale, the loss to Indian scholarship was permanent. A new Nalanda University opened nearby in 2014.
Find it on the floor: Nalanda & Takshashila Stacks
Older than Nalanda and less formal — students attached themselves to individual masters. Chanakya taught here. So, by tradition, did the physician Jivaka and the grammarian Panini.
Find it on the floor: Nalanda & Takshashila Stacks
Trained at Takshashila and, in the traditional account, was set an exam: find one plant in the district with no medicinal use. He came back empty-handed and was told he had passed.
Find it on the floor: Nalanda & Takshashila Stacks
painted in the dark · upper level
Thirty caves cut into a horseshoe cliff and painted in the dark by lamplight, then abandoned and forgotten for a thousand years until a British hunting party stumbled on them in 1819 while chasing a tiger.
Find it on the floor: The Ajanta Cliff Face
what was saved · lower level
On palm leaf, birch bark and paper, in dozens of scripts, sitting in temple stores and family trunks. The National Mission for Manuscripts has been trying to count them since 2003.
Find it on the floor: The Manuscript Crypt