The Egyptologist Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson interprets drawings in a tomb in Thebes as persons queuing up to have passports issued to them in 1500 BC. This was a millennium before Nehemiah asked King Artaxerxes in the Bible for ‘letters to be given me to the governors of the province beyond the river that they may let me pass through until I come to Judah’. How did we get from the roll of papyrus to the technically complex booklet we use today?
The basic components of a passport are facilitation and control — enabling the holder to travel while dictating what they can do. William the Conqueror would refuse his King’s Licence to persons who owed him feudal dues or if they were his enemy. It is safer to keep enemies in the kingdom than let them go abroad and return with an army.
As travel became more popular, passport issuing passed to government departments.
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