Ancient Wisdom

In the clay tablet archives of ancient Nippur, circa 1800 BCE, we find a remarkable text called "Eduba A" - a Sumerian student's account of his brutal day at scribe school. The student recites his failures: his Sumerian was poor, his...

In 1744, Iroquois diplomat Canasatego stood before Pennsylvania colonists holding a wampum belt and a wooden condolence cane carved with symbols. What puzzled the European observers was that this respected orator—who had negotiated treaties across...

In 215 BCE, during the Second Punic War, something peculiar happened in the Roman Forum. While Hannibal devastated Italian countryside, private contractors called publicani competed fiercely to win government contracts they knew would lose them...

In the Mongolian steppe during the 13th century, a herder might wake one morning, survey the grass around his camp, and make a decision that seemed to contradict everything: he would load his family and animals and move away from perfectly good...

The Inuktitut language contains more than thirty distinct terms for snow and ice conditions, but this isn't the quaint linguistic curiosity anthropologists once thought. Each word represented a survival algorithm—a compressed decision tree...

In the 1890s, anthropologist Franz Boas documented a Tlingit chief who spent three years accumulating copper shields, Hudson Bay blankets, and carved ceremonial spoons, only to distribute every item—along with most of his stored salmon and seal...

In 1911, Oglala Lakota elder Finger documented something that baffled American anthropologists: a formal ceremony where a family could adopt a complete stranger as a blood relative, creating kinship bonds considered more permanent than marriage. The...

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...