Ancient Wisdom

At Kyaik-hti-yo monastery in colonial Burma, nineteenth-century meditation students practiced a technique their teachers called "sweeping the corpse." For three hours before dawn, they'd lie motionless on bare boards while mentally...

In 44 BCE, Marcus Tullius Cicero maintained two writing surfaces in his study: permanent papyrus and erasable wax tablets. His secretaries knew the rule—anything written on wax stayed private until Cicero himself transferred it to papyrus. Modern...

In 350 BCE, a young aristocrat named Onesicritus arrived at the Athenian marketplace seeking wisdom from Diogenes of Sinope. The philosopher handed him a salted fish and commanded him to parade it through the agora while Diogenes followed behind,...

In the Anti-Atlas mountains of Morocco, you can still find the tighremt—fortified granaries built by Berber communities between the 12th and 16th centuries. These weren't simple storage buildings. Each family had a designated compartment...

In 1699, Guru Gobind Singh formalized the Khalsa code in Anandpur Sahib, but one practice predated even this momentous event by two centuries: Dasvandh, the requirement that Sikhs give away one-tenth of their earnings before calculating their own...

In 1273, in the Anatolian city of Konya, a young accountant named Ahmed left his position tracking grain shipments to enter the Mevlevi order. His master, followers of the poet Rumi, told him something strange: he would spend the next 1,001 days in...

In seventh-century Ireland, novice druids faced a peculiar requirement before learning to read Ogham, the tree-alphabet carved into standing stones across Celtic lands. They had to spend a full year identifying, touching, and carving the wood of...

In the throne room of Pharaoh Amenemhat III, around 1860 BCE, Egypt's chief vizier underwent something modern executives would find unbearable: a daily public questioning where subordinates could challenge his decisions from the previous day....

In 1259 BCE, after sixteen years of border skirmishes and one catastrophic battle at Kadesh, the Hittite Emperor Hattusili III and Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II did something unprecedented: they created identical copies of a peace treaty, one in...

In pre-colonial Aotearoa, when visiting parties approached a Māori marae (communal grounds), they participated in the pōwhiri—a layered welcome ceremony that could take hours. What's remarkable isn't the ceremony's complexity, but...