Ancient Wisdom

In the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa, a !Kung San tracker named /Twi once followed a wounded gemsbok for three days through territory crossed by dozens of other animals. When anthropologist Louis Liebenberg asked how he distinguished his...

In the atrium of wealthy Roman homes during the Late Republic (2nd-1st century BCE), something unusual hung on the walls during dinner parties: wax death masks of deceased family members, called imagines maiorum. These weren't tucked away in...

In the Bay of Biscay, where the Basque have fished cod and whale since before Roman chroniclers could spell their language's name, fishing crews followed a practice that would horrify modern management consultants: they left port without...

In the 16th century Scottish Highlands, clan chieftains faced a peculiar problem. Their bodyguards—trusted warriors who knew every vulnerable moment, every travel route, every family secret—could become dangerous precisely because they knew too...

In the scriptorium of Clairvaux Abbey in 1147, a monk named William spent nine months hand-copying Augustine's "City of God"—326 pages of precise Latin text on vellum. When he reached the final page, he added a colophon, a scribal...

In 692 CE, K'inich Janaab Pakal ordered construction of inscriptions at Palenque that would commemorate a date 1,246 years in his future. He was sixty-eight years old. He would be dead within a year. Yet he dedicated the final months of his...

In the 1920s, Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen documented something that puzzled him about Caribou Inuit hunters in the Kivalliq region. The most skilled hunter, after bringing down the largest caribou of the season, would immediately distribute the...

In 500 BCE Ephesus, the philosopher Heraclitus watched merchants panic as the Persian Empire's expansion shifted trade routes overnight. While other teachers offered their students advice on choosing secure professions, Heraclitus did something...

In 1954, Thai Buddhist monk Ajahn Chah established Wat Pah Pong monastery in the scrubland of northeast Thailand's Ubon Ratchathani province. Among his more puzzling instructions to the Western monks who began arriving in the 1960s was this:...

When Aristotle taught at the Lyceum in Athens around 335 BCE, he didn't just tell his students to "find balance." He gave them a mathematical framework. The concept of mesotes—often translated as the "golden...