Ancient Wisdom

In 1587, young Lachlan Maclean of Duart spent his thirteenth year not in his father's castle on the Isle of Mull, but seventy miles away in the household of Clan Campbell—his family's sworn enemies. This wasn't kidnapping. It was...

In Book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle wrestles with a problem that perplexed him more than questions of virtue or happiness: akrasia, often translated as "weakness of will" but more precisely meaning "acting against...

In the Marshall Islands, somewhere between the 12th and 16th centuries, master navigators developed the mattang—a stick chart made of coconut fronds lashed together with cowrie shells marking island positions and curved sticks representing wave...

In the Mande-speaking regions of West Africa, from the thirteenth-century Mali Empire through today, griots—the hereditary oral historians known as jeli—practice something that seems contradictory to their role as memory keepers. Every seven...

In 8th century Kerala, the philosopher Adi Shankara encountered a student who kept asking "What is the Self?" Shankara gave a different answer each time—first through silence, then through poetry, then by asking the student to describe...

In the workers' village of Deir el-Medina, the craftsmen who built the Valley of the Kings operated under a constraint that would horrify modern productivity experts: they deliberately changed their tasks throughout the day based on the...

In third-century Persia, Zoroastrian priests taught that every soul after death must cross the Chinvat Bridge—a span that literally changes width based on who approaches it. For the righteous, it broadens into an easy passage. For those who chose...

In 11th-century Persia, physician Abu Ali ibn Sina—known in the West as Avicenna—wrote detailed prescriptions that puzzled European scholars for centuries. He didn't just recommend medicinal plants. He specified the exact time patients...

In traditional Igbo communities of southeastern Nigeria, the ofo staff—a sacred object representing ancestral authority and collective truth—came with a counterintuitive protocol. During village assemblies called umunna or amala, speakers...

In 540 BCE, Cyrus the Great built something counterintuitive in the arid Iranian plateau: gardens with walls so high that visitors couldn't see out. These pairi-daeza—literally "walled around"—weren't fortifications. They...