Ancient Wisdom

Walk through the ruins of Knossos, the largest Minoan palace on Crete, and you'll notice something absent from nearly every other ancient civilization's administrative centers: there's no grand throne room. No elevated seat for a...

In the stone halls of twelfth-century Clairvaux Abbey, Brother Pierre had a problem. He'd fallen asleep during his assigned hour of night prayer—Matins, the 2 a.m. vigil. But he didn't discover his failure through a reprimand from the...

In 300 BCE, an Etruscan haruspex—a priest trained in the art of divination—would examine a sacrificed sheep's liver divided into sixteen sections, each corresponding to a region of sky and a specific deity. Before advising generals or...

Walk into any Gurdwara—a Sikh temple—between 1699 and today, and you'll encounter something that defies modern organizational logic. The langar, the community kitchen serving free meals to anyone regardless of religion or status, operates...

In the old city of Sana'a, Yemen, master silver-beaters working on the elaborate jambiya daggers followed a practice that seemed designed to slow them down. Every hour, documented in 19th-century guild records, they would switch their hammer to...

In Book VIII of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle draws a distinction that modern professionals desperately need. He identifies three types of friendship: those based on utility, those based on pleasure, and the rare philía teleía—complete...

In 1953, when Tenzing Norgay summited Everest with Edmund Hillary, Western newspapers celebrated the conquest of the world's highest peak. Sherpa communities in the Khumbu valley marked the achievement differently: they noted that both men...

In the palm-wine markets of 18th-century Igboland, a peculiar leadership practice would have baffled any European observer. The eldest man of the umunna—the patrilineage council—would preside over dispute resolution for exactly one market week...

When a Ju/'hoan tracker from the Central Kalahari prepares to follow kudu spoor into the bush, he performs a practice that seems counterintuitive to pursuit: before moving forward, he turns completely around and studies the terrain behind him....

In 1469, a fourteen-year-old boy entered Andrea del Verrocchio's Florentine workshop expecting to learn painting. Instead, he spent his first year grinding minerals into pigments, his second year preparing wooden panels, and his third year...