🎓 Communities who never met IRL are older than you think

Online friendships are not so very different from the Mesopotamian brotherhood of kings, or the Kula ring of the Trobriand Islanders in the Southwest Pacific

Feb 20, 2025

Imagine calling some guy you’ve never met “brother” — and meaning it. Sending letters carried via caravans and ships, sending gifts of gold and the fanciest treasures you can find, and even shipping off your daughter for him to marry.

If you think about it a little bit sideways, it’s got NIGERIAN PRINCE SCAM written all over it, but in the ancient world it was pretty normal.

Even before we had telephones or airplanes, ancient kings, traders, and seafarers managed to build long-distance relationships that were surprisingly robust and meaningful. These relationships spanned hundreds or even thousands of miles, with communication taking weeks or months one-way. Yet they mattered immensely to the people involved — politically, economically, and indeed emotionally.

Most of my deepest friendships have been mediated mostly through the internet. I met my maid of honor through a writing group that has since evolved into a nonprofit arts program. We’ve been friends for a decade. We first met when a bunch of her stuff got ruined while she was out of the country and I drove up to NYC to give her a book case for her new apartment. I see her in person sporadically — once a month at most, sometimes once every few years. Other friends from that writing group sent me gifts for holidays or celebrations and have only met me once or never, but we keep in touch. I care about them.

The Obsidian community is another online community that has been deeply meaningful to my life. I’ve won awards, I’ve gotten jobs, I’ve developed connections and friendships with a great many people through it. And even though the vast majority of the people involved in the Obsidian community have not met in person, we are a community. We have shared rituals, we’ve exchanged prestige goods, and many of us have hung large parts of our identity on the tools we use.

The weird part of this is that it is not weird at all. Long-distance communities of people bound by remarkably few (if any) in-person bonding opportunities are not new, they’ve existed since before the dawn of civilization.

Long-distance communities in the ancient world functioned largely through the exchange of prestigious goods, letters, and daughters (which I am not going to write about today, see my previous articles about diplomatic marriages in the Levant and the Eurasian steppes. All I’ll say on the topic is that these kinship ties mattered to people). Ancient kings, traders, and explorers kept social bonds alive across vast distances, and constructed deeply meaningful group identities doing it.

Ancient Kings

As early civilizations grew, intensified long-distance trade brought new ideas, basic commodities, and exotic materials like copper from long distances away. Trade established political—and sometimes ritual—ties between distant communities.

One of the main ways ancient peoples maintained long-distance relationships was by exchanging prestige goods — rare, exotic, or symbolically important items that conferred status on the receiver. These were not everyday trade goods for profit; they were gifts or high-value exchanges that acted as social glue. By sending a gorgeous piece of lapis lazuli from Afghanistan to a pharaoh in Egypt, or trading Baltic amber to a Mycenaean Greek chieftain, far-flung elites signaled mutual respect and friendship.

The Late Bronze Age Amarna Letters — clay tablets recording correspondence between Egyptian pharaohs and other Near Eastern kings — are full of polite flattery and gift lists. A typical letter might have the Pharaoh bragging about sending “gold in great quantity” and fine linens, expecting silver and lapis lazuli in return from his Mesopotamian counterpart. These were not straightforward business deals; they were gestures of alliance. Egyptian rulers depended heavily on gift exchanges with other rulers to maintain diplomacy, although they were considered outliers for not being willing to marry off their daughters.

Regardless, gifts weren’t just gifts; they had symbolic weight. Sending cedar wood from Lebanon to Egypt wasn’t just about the wood — it was representative of the Lebanese city-states’ loyalty and the Pharaoh’s prestige. Possessing a rare item from a far land was a status symbol, yes, but it also implied a relationship: “Look, I have this fancy thing because I have friends in distant places.”

These prestige goods became conversation pieces across cultures, much like modern professionals might bond by swapping corporate swag or memorabilia from overseas — they’re small tokens that say “we’re part of the same network.” An internet friend of mine came to visit around my birthday in December, and he brought me this really cool Japanese mug that was made during the Occupation era. Like the art I mentioned being irreplaceable by AI, it’s exactly the kind of prestige good that cannot be mass-produced and bought off of Amazon because what it represents (friendship, thoughtfulness) matters as much as what it is. When I bought my mom a silk kimono when I was in Japan (the kind you wear to your wedding, not just a generic silk robe) it was a conversation piece more than just an expensive thing to have.

It’s easy to get caught up in the things that ancient royal did — they left the best records, after all — but not all prestige exchanges were royal.

Not Just the Royals

Not all long-distance relationships in antiquity were orchestrated by kings and elites; many were upheld by regular seafarers and traders through ritualized exchange systems. For example, merchants and travelers and regular people in societies with relatively flat social hierarchies also partook in gift-giving to grease the wheels of commerce and hospitality. In many cultures, a trader arriving from afar would present local leaders with gifts before doing business, establishing trust.

The example I picked up from Beyond the Blue Horizon by Bryan Fagan is the Kula ring of the Trobriand Islanders in the Southwest Pacific. In the Kula exchange, communities across many islands formed a vast circle of partnerships by trading shell valuables in a strictly ceremonial way. These items – ornate shell necklaces and armbands – had no practical use (you didn’t wear or spend them) but carried immense social value. Every exchange had elaborate rules and rituals, and bonded men into lifelong partnerships.

In most traditional societies, people trusted primarily their family or clan. What long-distance trade networks did was to extend trust to outsiders by formalizing them as something like family. Much like the Near Eastern kings calling each other “brother,” merchants in some cultures swore brotherhood pacts or became “blood brothers” in ceremony to solidify their business partnership.

It was the first thing I thought of when NFTs were getting to be a big deal? Like the ancient exchange of turquoise or lapis lazuli, Bored Ape images had little (no) intrinsic practical use. Their primary value was in signaling membership in an elite group — for example, some crypto tokens got you access to exclusive discord communities. The point was demonstrating that the token holder could afford and display this expensive, limited-edition token.

Social signalling isn’t some dumb thing only idiots do — social signalling is really useful to social animals, actually. It is almost always valuable to be able to easily declare who you are to the world, which is one of the reasons Derek Guy is so popular on Twitter. He speaks to that human impulse and helps people decode that language.

Before NFTs it was signed baseball cards, but as a phenomenon it goes back thousands of years. Maybe tens of thousands of years. Maybe even hundreds. Otzi the Iceman had tattoos, after all.

If nothing else, this kind of visible-at-a-glance social signalling helps you find compatible friends and mates — a nontrivial task even in the golden age of OK Cupid (RIP).

It’s hard to wrap our capitalist1, western brains around it, but gift economies were a whole thing. Entire societies ran off of obligations and relationships and giving things away to show status. I personally first learned about the concept in Anne McCaffrey’s Peytabee series (not an affiliate link) but they’re based on a real thing (potlaches) in Native American communities in the Pacific Northwest.

Most of the time, a gift either encourages or demands a counter-gift eventually, tying the two parties into a cycle of exchange and contact. Over time, such cycles can link entire networks of communities. The Silk Road is a common example. I’m still working my way through The Silk Roads by

Peter Frankopan

2, but it’s an interesting book precisely because it treats all the cultures along those trade routes as one unit.

Farther back, in the Bronze Age, luxury materials like amber, jade, seashells, and finely wrought metalwork moved through vast interlinked trade webs, connecting Europe, Africa, and Asia. Scholars call it a “prestige-goods economy” where elites maintained power by controlling these long-distance goodies and the alliances they represented. In effect, prestige goods were the social media of the ancient world’s elite — a medium to broadcast status and maintain connections across great distances.

Long Distance Letters

Ok, I said I wasn’t going to dwell on it, but it’s hard to talk about letters without also talking about intermarriage. A foreign princess in Egypt might keep correspondence with her family back home, acting as a cultural bridge. The children born of these international marriages had mixed heritage, potentially laying the groundwork for future understanding between peoples. These marriages were strategic, but they also humanized international relations. When a Hittite princess came to Egypt to marry Ramses II after the Egyptian–Hittite peace treaty, the two royal families exchanged years of warm letters. Rhetoric like “there was no border between Hatti and Egypt – the two lands were one family now” is pretty idealistic, but I think it’s a mistake to dismiss it as “just words.” Maybe the common people didn’t pay that much attention to it, but there was at least an aspiration that long-distance alliances could make different peoples feel bonded like one community. And honestly, when the British Prince Harry married Meghan of California, it was a big deal.

Leaders before the information age were able to do “networking” in a very literal way: forging a web of kin across countries. A king’s family tree might stretch from the Mediterranean to Mesopotamia. Those ties mattered — even when they never saw their daughter again, or never met their grandson. It wasn’t just the genetic ties, these were formalized pacts maintained by regular communication: letters and envoys bearing news. Like the gifts and birthday cards an aunt from out of state might send when the kids are too young to easily visit, they keep the connection alive.

Modern professional networks are full of people who rarely meet, but still consider each other allies or collaborators. The difference is that instead of LinkedIn or group chats, ancients used marriage ceremonies and diplomatic couriers. But the goal was similar: turn a distant stranger into someone you have a stake in — ideally, someone you can call “brother.”

Manuscriptions

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