Ancient Wisdom

In the mountains of Kurdistan, before courts and contracts, before notaries and deeds, a traveling singer named a dengbêj would arrive at a village dispute over land boundaries or inheritance divisions. Both parties would state their claims. The...

In the Kimberley region of Western Australia, young Martu men traditionally undertook walkabouts that lasted not days but seasons—sometimes six months of traversing the same ancestral country their great-grandfathers had walked. To European...

In third-century Persia, Zoroastrian priests practiced a ritual that modern productivity experts would find bizarre: before sleeping, they performed a mental accounting called the "chinvat calculation"—literally weighing their day's...

In the upper Amazon basin of Ecuador, the Shuar people practiced something that seems absurd to our productivity-obsessed culture: before a young person could learn a new skill—whether hunting, healing, or negotiation—they first had to spend...

In 1586, Sen no Rikyū, tea master to the shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi, commissioned a set of tea bowls from the potter Chōjirō. When the artisan delivered them, Rikyū inspected each one carefully, then deliberately dropped several of the most...

In the conference rooms of Oslo and Stockholm, a peculiar translation problem frustrates business negotiations. When Sami reindeer herders from northern Scandinavia discuss seasonal planning with southern partners, they aren't dividing the year...

In traditional Samoan villages, when a man needed to negotiate marriage terms, resolve a land dispute, or defend his reputation in the fono (village council), the most powerful advocate wasn't his lawyer, chief, or even himself. It was his...

In pre-Christian Slavic villages, before a family committed to building a new barn, betrothing a daughter, or swearing an alliance with neighboring clans, they gathered at the Rod altar—a simple wooden shrine housing carved representations of...

In 1130, the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela instituted a peculiar policy that frustrated countless pilgrims. Before receiving their Compostela certificate of completion, travelers had to wait three full days in Santiago—but only if...

In pre-colonial Philippines, when a family needed to relocate their bahay kubo—a traditional bamboo house—the entire barangay would gather at dawn. Forty to fifty neighbors would position themselves beneath the stilted structure, hoist it onto...