What up, my petrified organs?
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Okay, now for what you actually clicked for.
If you like to travel (especially across borders), a passport is one of the most important things
you can own.
Passports are sophisticated marvels of modern technology designed to make it easier for
the average traveler to cross a border, for a host country to know who is coming in and
going out, and for certain annoying commenters on my videos to call them “slave IDs”.
But how did they cross borders in the ancient world?
Was there some kind of equivalent to passports in antiquity?
Well, in the ancient world, things were (kind of unsurprisingly) quite different from today.
Ancient empires couldn’t necessarily defend long borders, and borders were often quite
a bit more porous and not always strict lines in the ground.
Thus, borders as we know them today were kind of impossible in the ancient world, and were
more like frontiers, with each side being kind of a sovereignty gradient, and was more
focused on keeping out invading armies than illegal immigrants and smugglers.
This was a time long before before Westphalian sovereignty, and the borders of the various
kingdoms and empires were of course incredibly fluid, with borders changing pretty much every
few months in some places at some times.
I mean, just watch an EmperorTigerstar video and try to see where any ancient empire could
set up a hard border.
Of course, travel itself was also not as common as it is today.
People did still travel though, and often needed to travel between the different empires
of the day.
The first mention of any form of cross-border travel document we have is found in the Hebrew
Bible, specifically Nehemiah 2:7-9, when Persian official Nehemiah asked King Artaxerxes I
for a letter to give to “the governors beyond the river” requesting they give him safe
passage on his way to Judea.
In China however, everyone who wanted to travel throughout the different imperial counties
required a special document called “zhuan”, which detailed height, age and bodily features
of the holder in question.
Later on, in the time of the Islamic Caliphates, their basic passport was something called
a “bara’a”, which granted the user permission to travel to different parts of the Islamic
realm, but only if they had paid their taxes, be they zakat or jizya.
So, in a sense it was more like a passport granted as a receipt for paying your taxes,
a little like showing your ticket to a fare inspector on the metro so you can get on the
train.
Passports further evolved over in Europe, especially in 15th and 16th century England,
starting with documents for English subjects to prove who they were in foreign lands, and
the invention of the word “passport”.
“Pass” coming from the French “passer” meaning to pass through, and “port” coming
from the French “port” referring to seaports, a means of passing through a port of entry.
First mentioned in the Safe Conducts Act of 1414, these safe conduct documents were usually
notes signed by the monarch asking the bearer be granted safe passage, and were often even
granted to foreign subjects, not just Englishmen.
The development of the passport however was thrown into overdrive with the invention of
easier modes of transport, especially railroads.
Trains helped shrink both Europe and North America, but we’re going to focus on Europe
first because Schengen didn’t exist back then (well, I’m sure the village did, but
still).
As a result of so many people suddenly being able to travel so far so quickly, passport
requirements were actually lowered.
Around the world, crossing borders as a civilian was actually very easy, and passports weren’t
often required.
After all, the only other alternative while everything was figured out was apocalyptic
gridlock.
In fact, when new immigrants came on the boats to the US-- whose borders were relatively
open-- their passage through Ellis Island was mainly to process new arrivals as they
came into the US (as long as they weren’t part of an “inadmissible group”, of course),
and also make sure they were clear on the whole having-diseases front.
However, during World War the-one-without-the-Nazis, the borders of Europe were obviously closed…
and also not exactly very crossable either.
After the war ended though, in 1920 the League of Nations had a talk, and they organized
a system that gave birth to the passport booklet as we know it today.
Before this time, passports were still basically just sheets of paper with the bearer’s identity
that another country could stamp.
Passports were then standardized after the International Civil Aviation Organization
(ICAO) got their hands on it in 1980, making passports all machine-readable for easier
entry across borders.
To avoid counterfeit, countries are also using various new security features, from biometric
data to holograms to the little electronics that are the reason you really shouldn’t
bend your passport.
Nowadays, every country in the world has a passport in all different kinds of… well,
actually four different base colors, one size, and one general shape, but also have all kinds
of different features representing their countries.
For example, the New Zealand passport has Māori translations on it, the US and Canadian
passports depict patriotic scenes from their countries, Russia grants its citizens different
passports for both internal and external use, and this East German passport is actually
a notebook I got in Friedrichstraße.
The point is, while we are at a point where just about every country, territory, or group
of countries requires one to use a passport to get in (often also needing a visa on top
of that), it is now arguably easier than ever to get a passport, hundred of millions-- if
not billions-- of people already have one, which accompany them on the thousands of flights
that cross an international border every single day.
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