Chapter 9, Section 3 – India’s Classical Age The Gupta Empire was the next great Indian empire. During this period, India experienced a classical or golden age. It was a time of great advances that affected them for many years to come. Literature, art, science and math flourished or grew. The emperor Chandra Gupta II used his wealth to encourage artists and scholars. Across India, there was a burst of learning and creative activity. Before and during Gupta rule, many kinds of literature flowered. The greatest writer at the time was the poet Kalidasa, who wrote plays and poetry in the ancient language of Sanskrit. Fables were another popular form of literature. A fable is a story that contains a moral or lesson. Fairy tales and folk tales were also widely read. Other arts flourished under Chandra Gupta II as well. Sculptors carved statues out of stone and bronze. Stone cutters carved temples out of one huge rock. Music and dance also thrived. The game of chess first appeared in northern India and spread along trade routes to other parts of the world. Two important advances in math occurred under Gupta rule. One was the development of Hindu-Arabic numbers and the concept of zero as a number. Hindu-Arabic numbers are the numbers 0 – 9 that we use today. Another important advance was the decimal system, a counting system based on units of ten. Today these number systems are used all over the world. A mathematician and astronomer named Aryabhatta wrote a great book on Hindu math. He was the first to understand that the world is round and rotates on an axis to create day and night. Indian doctors wrote medical textbooks and described thousands of diseases and hundreds of types of medicine. The achievements that were made during the Classical Age under the Gupta family have had a large impact on the modern world.