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Mar 21, 2025

The Third Edit: With civilisation, came bureaucracy and red tape | The Indian Express

Opinion by Editorial One may imagine the endless forms and serpentine queues outside government offices to be modern-day afflictions. But, as it turns out, their roots go back more than 4,000 years —

Opinion by Editorial

One may imagine the endless forms and serpentine queues outside government offices to be modern-day afflictions. But, as it turns out, their roots go back more than 4,000 years — to the ancient Sumerians. The cradle of civilisation didn’t just come up with the wheel, writing, and the first empire in history — it also gave the world its first red tape. Archaeologists from the British Museum and Iraq have recently unearthed hundreds of administrative tablets from the ancient city of Girsu (modern-day Tello in Iraq), revealing that the temple state was obsessed with bureaucracy.

The Akkadian empire lasted from 2300 to 2150 BC and, under its first ruler Sargon, it began developing a meticulous administrative system, whose purpose seems to have been to ensure that nothing slipped through the cracks. From the weight of a fattened cow or a 30-litre barrel of beer to inventories of grain or expenses on items as vastly different as gemstones and fish, from records of personnel to the nature of their employment, everything was recorded in cuneiform script on stone tablets. These became part of the state archive, passed down as templates for governance. The ruling class’s fascination with bureaucracy has historical antecedents in other civilisations too. In ancient Egypt, the pharaohs had entire departments dedicated to tallying bricks, measuring stone blocks, and recording the hours worked by each labourer. Meanwhile, under the Zhou dynasty (1046-256 BC), the imperial court in China had a dizzying array of officials whose job was to codify and standardise nearly every aspect of life. By the time the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) rolled in, the Chinese had mastered even the art of civil service examinations — among its many requirements was the ability to recite vast swathes of Confucian texts.

Of course, little of the tangled web of rules made for an enviable experience for those at the receiving end of the scrutiny. The Sumerian tablets elsewhere, for instance, show complaints against a particularly inefficient but influential member of a merchants’ guild. The conveniences of the digital era notwithstanding, not much has changed: Bureaucracy’s ability to test one’s patience remains timeless.

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