Name: The 3,000-year-old history of the passport | BBC Global
Uploaded: 2024-09-07T16:42:00.000Z
Duration: 4 min 8 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

One might travel to find something abroad, travel for diversion, one might travel to escape something at home, one might travel out of the necessity to find work or safety.

All of those motives are attached to the passport in some way, because regardless of what your particular reason for going abroad is, that document is a constant.

I am particularly interested in the passport as an object, as a kind of artifact, redolent, more full of stories and emotions and more of a spur to the imagination than almost any other document you'll find in the historical archive.

It's a legal document, it has this bureaucratic function that ties our personal desires for travel, connection, adventure, friendship, whatever they may be, to these larger bureaucratic structures, which are not just national but international in scope.

The history of the passport actually goes all the way back to the 14th century BCE, so 3500 years ago in ancient Egypt, messengers were sent out by their sovereigns with terracotta or clay tablets that were inscribed with cuneiform characters, sometimes to arrange marriages, sometimes to deliver messages, but always to engage in an early form of international relations.

Something like the modern passport really arises in the 18th century with the emergence of the modern nation states.

During the course of the 19th century, passports didn't include photos that described the individual, their nose, their chin, their complexion, and so forth, often in very subjective or vague language, so the nose is average or normal, which I don't know what that tells anybody.

The passport as we know it doesn't really emerge until the 20th century during the First World War, when concerns about sabotage and spying and so forth, concerns related to the war, led nation states to reimpose passport controls.

One of their first actions was to hold a conference on passports and passport controls, and it was at that conference in 1920 that the first sort of universal standards for the document itself, the size, the shape, the contents, as the passport system has evolved increasingly rapidly over the last decade or so, there's more and more data gathering, not just about those personal details inscribed in the passport, but about the structure of our face or the veins in our eyeballs or what have you, so that the system itself is gathering an almost, one might say, dystopian amount of information about individuals so that we are completely within the purview or control of that system as we move around the world.

And for someone like me, an English professor who loves books, who's kind of an analog creature, it's disappointing to see the passport evolving in those ways.

But it remains a document that we can look back on in our own personal, you can see that picture of yourself much younger and remember, you know, sort of the experiences you had traveling and, you know, look at those stamps and kind of remember the course that you took through your travels.