Ancient Wisdom

In the fog-shrouded hills of ancient Etruria, roughly 600 BCE, a specialized priest called a haruspex would receive a freshly sacrificed sheep liver. But instead of examining it randomly, he'd lay it against a bronze model—a physical template...

In traditional Romani communities across 19th and early 20th century Europe, the kris romani—a tribunal of respected elders—made decisions with an unusual feature that would horrify modern legal scholars: many verdicts came with built-in...

In 1330, a Bolognese alchemist named Petrus Bonus described a practice that seemed wasteful to his contemporaries: after each failed attempt at transmutation, he would prepare a small meal using the remnants of his work—calcined minerals ground...

In 13th-century Konya, Jalaluddin Rumi's teaching circle practiced something that would horrify modern meeting facilitators. When students gathered for sohbet—spiritual conversation—anyone could interrupt the teacher mid-sentence. More...

In Plato's Meno, the slave boy believes he knows how to double a square's area. Socrates asks simple questions. Within minutes, the boy realizes he's wrong—then admits something remarkable: "I do not know." Socrates calls...

When a San hunter from the !Xo group in Botswana found a kudu carcass killed by leopards in the 1960s, he didn't celebrate the discovery. Instead, ethnographer Louis Liebenberg documented something counterintuitive: the hunter walked backward...

In the Rift Valley highlands of Kenya and Tanzania, Maasai elders practiced something that seems counterintuitive to knowledge workers obsessed with documentation: they deliberately engineered forgetting. The enkiguena—reconciliation ceremonies...

In the 1880s, trading post owner J. B. Moore noticed something peculiar at his Ganado, Arizona location. Navajo weavers—whose geometric precision in their rugs rivaled anything produced in Persian workshops—would deliberately break their own...

In the Golden Temple at Amritsar, established by Guru Arjan Dev in 1604, musicians called kirtanis perform a practice that seems inefficient to modern ears: they sing each line of the Guru Granth Sahib twice. The first singing is called the shabad;...

In the forests of the Great Lakes region, Anishinaabe communities faced a leadership puzzle that modern organizations still struggle with: how do you identify who should lead before they've accumulated the very power that corrupts judgment? The...