From a somewhat interesting but over-long Aeon article on demon lore across cultures:
Carried along these same trade routes, mirror divination is a daimonological technology attested from North Africa to China. First mentioned in a 3rd-century CE Egyptian manuscript, the practice has always involved a single device and three actors: a human child, a human adult and a daimon. In the role of medium, the child is made to gaze into a reflective surface – a mirror, a bowl of water with oil floating on its surface, the polished blade of a weapon, etc – in which a daimon will appear. The adult at whose knees the child is sitting then utters a spell to bring the daimon into the device. He transmits to the daimon a set of questions about some present or future event, which the daimon answers through the child medium.
This technique spread quickly, appearing in both a Zoroastrian inscription from the 3rd century CE and in Jewish Talmudic sources from Sasanian Persia; in several 7th- to 12th-century Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Taoist texts from India, China, Japan and Tibet; in the Policraticus (1159) by the English cleric John of Salisbury; and in medieval and modern-day Jewish, Muslim and Ethiopic sources from North Africa. The instructions found in a work titled the ‘Secret Rites’, an early 8th-century Chinese translation of a Sanskrit work, are virtually identical to those given in the 3rd-century Egyptian manuscript:
In front of an icon of the Immovable One [the Buddhist god Acala], let the officiant cleanse the ground and burn Parthian incense. Let him then take a mirror, place it over the heart [of the icon], and continue reciting the spell. Have a young boy or girl look into the mirror. When you ask what they see, the child will immediately tell you all you want to know.
The same article has many other tales of pan-Eurasian demon lore; a particularly fine one is the story of how the Indian prince Vijaya came to Sri Lanka, which is eerily similar to the Odyssey's tale of Circe's island.
Back in the 1990s I used to talk on the train sometimes with a woman who was a Koren translator for some intelligence agency. I once wondered to her how people learned foreign languages in the centuries before courses and grammars and dictionaries. She shook her head emphatically and said that all that stuff is only an impediment to language acquisition; better, she said, to just start talking and listening and work it out as you go. I'm not sure she was right, but anyway it is clear that the thousands of languages in use across Eurasia did not stop the spread of ideas. People have always found ways to communicate.
Once they figured out how to talk to each other, what did they share? Let's note, first, that they did business; there is nothing more fundamental to human civilization than trade. I have something you want, you have something I want, let's make a deal. Despite incredible risks – some historians think the death rate for sailors on their first trans-Atlantic slave-trading voyage was around 40 percent – valuable goods always found their way to buyers across any distance.
Also, crops and domesticated animals. Chickens were somehow carried from India to Japan and Iceland, wheat from Syria to Siberia and Ghana. Hot peppers from Mexico were in use across the world by 1550.
Fundamental technologies, like making bronze, or crucible steel.
And stories. This includes amusing tales like Cindirella, but also sacred lore like the story of the Seven Sleepers. And, as the Aeon article notes, tales about demons and how to overcome them.
This is humanity: we travel across vast distances to trade with each other, learn each other's languages, tell each other stories, and share advice on how to survive on our demon-haunted planet. We also kill and enslave each other, but I think if you focus too much on that you are missing much of what we are.
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