Narrator: In 762, the city of Baghdad was established by Al-Mansur. The centre was a perfect circle. The round city. By 814, Baghdad was the world's largest city with over one million inhabitants.

Baghdad, in modern Iraq ... the city reached its zenith in the early medieval period. The fall of the Western Roman Empire shifted global focus to the Eastern Roman Empire, with its Emperor ...

In The Golden Road, Dalrymple proposes that India had a role in shaping and reshaping the ancient and medieval world ... helped plan Baghdad as a circular city, probably inspired by the mandala.