Before Google. Before AI. Before anyone knew what a keyword was. People were still trying to be found.
I'm not a marketer. I'm in the process of becoming one. One that's maybe just a little bit silly about it.
I've spent the last few months reading, discussing, absorbing everything I could about modern marketing. Strategy, SEO, GEO, AEO, distribution, conversion. My brain does this thing where it can't just accept a new framework at face value. It has to drag it back thousands of years first, back to before things ran on binary, to find the shape underneath.
And what I kept finding was this: the shape was already there. Different name, same purpose. Same human instinct, different interface.
Phil Cousineau, mythologist and author of The Art of Pilgrimage, said something at the Elixir Festival that stopped me:
What's true now, true tomorrow.
He was talking about myth. But it applies here too.
The Ancient Game
1. Temples on Hilltops → Domain Authority
Temples weren't just built high for spiritual reasons. They were built high so everyone in the region could see them. Maximum visibility, zero ad spend. The higher the structure, the more terrain it dominated, the more credibility and reach it commanded.
That's domain authority. The sites that rank are the ones that everyone can see from a distance, the ones that have been standing long enough that people reference them by default.
2. Roman Merchants at City Gates → Search Intent
Merchants in ancient Rome didn't pick their stall locations randomly. They placed themselves at city gates, at the points where people were already moving, already arriving, already looking for something. The rent wasn't cheap. The foot traffic was worth it.
That's search intent. You don't interrupt people. You position yourself exactly where they're already going with a specific need already formed. The keyword isn't the thing you sell. It's the gate they're walking through.
3. Pompeii's Painted Walls → Review Marketing and Display Ads
Pompeii had painted advertisements on its walls. Business names. Services offered. Recommendations from locals. Some of them have survived 2,000 years of volcanic ash and still communicate clearly: this person was here, this is what they did, people vouched for them.
That's review marketing and display advertising. The wall is the feed. The paint is the creative. The local recommendation is the five-star review. The only thing that changed is the surface.
4. The Rosetta Stone → Localisation
The same message, written in three different scripts for three different audiences: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Ancient Greek. Not three different messages. One message, translated with enough cultural context to land for each reader.
That's localisation strategy. The insight isn't just translate the words. It's translate the intent so the right person in the right context understands what you're actually saying.
5. The Library of Alexandria → Search Engine Indexing
The ancient world's most ambitious project: collect every scroll of human knowledge, organise it, cross-reference it, and make it findable. The Library of Alexandria wasn't a monument to accumulation. It was an infrastructure project. The goal was retrieval.
That's search engine indexing. Google isn't doing something new. It's doing what Alexandria attempted at planetary scale, with better uptime.
6. The Oracle at Delphi → Google (and Early Prompt Engineering)
People travelled from every corner of the ancient world to Delphi with burning questions. They made offerings. They waited. They received answers.
She was literally Google. You came with intent. She returned a result.
She was also deliberately vague so she could never be wrong.
Early prompt engineering. 😂
But underneath the theatrics, the structure is identical: a question enters, a system processes it against everything it knows, a result comes back shaped for the person who asked. The medium is different. The relationship between human and answer is the same.
What This Actually Means
The medium changed. The algorithm has a different name. The platform updates every six months and breaks something that was working. But underneath all of it, humans are doing what they have always done.
Trying to be found. By the right people. At the right time. With the right message.
Modern marketing isn't a new invention. It's the ancient game running on new infrastructure. And honestly, once you see it that way, the overwhelm of keeping up with every new tool and tactic gets a little quieter. Because the fundamentals aren't new. They're ancient. They've been tested across centuries and civilisations and they still hold.
The Oracle is now a search bar. The hilltop temple is now a domain rating. The painted wall is now a sponsored post. The Rosetta Stone is now a hreflang tag.
Same game. New interface.
And if what's true now is true tomorrow, the inverse holds too: what worked then, in some form, still works now.
That's not a coincidence. That's just humans being humans.
