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Wellsprings
geography

Nomoi (Customs of Peoples)

νόμοι

The ethnographic habit of cataloguing each people's customs — their laws, dress, food, worship, and rites of death — on the principle that 'custom is king of all.'

Nomoi are a people's customs and laws, and comparing them systematically is the heart of Greek ethnography: describing how each nation marries, eats, dresses, worships, and buries its dead, and noting that every people believes its own ways are best. Herodotus (5th century BCE) pioneered this comparative description and famously quoted Pindar's line that 'custom is king of all' — a near-relativist observation about cultural difference. Later geographers and historians such as Strabo and Diodorus Siculus carried the method forward.

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7 Greek sources

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