Ancient Wisdom

In the lowlands of ninth-century Cambodia, Khmer hydraulic engineers faced an impossible problem. The monsoons delivered six months of torrential rain followed by six months of drought. Store too little water, and crops failed. Store too much, and...

Among the Bedouin tribes of the Rub' al-Khali—the Empty Quarter of Arabia—hospitality wasn't measured by the lavishness of meals or the comfort of shelter. It was measured by something far more peculiar: the number of days a guest...

When the Hittite king Muwatalli II negotiated with the kingdom of Amurru around 1315 BCE, he did something that seems bizarre to modern contract-makers: he spent more time listing witnesses than defining obligations. The treaty tablets from Hattusa...

In the fourth century BCE, the Phoenician city of Tyre operated the Mediterranean's busiest commercial harbor through a practice that would horrify modern compliance officers: merchants calculated and paid their own penalties when breaking port...

When King Wen compiled the I Ching around 1150 BCE while imprisoned by the Shang dynasty, he created something unexpected: a decision-making system that told you when NOT to decide. Hexagram 23, "Po" (splitting apart), counsels radical...

In a modern conference room, interrupting your CEO mid-sentence would be career suicide. In a traditional Tongan kava ceremony, it's a precisely calibrated social technology that's been managing power dynamics for over a thousand...

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...