The Bureaucratic Origins of Political Theory: Administrative Labor in the “Other Half” of the History of Political Thought

Abstract

The earliest works of political theory precede Athenian democracy—the traditional starting point of Anglophone histories of political thought—by over two millennia. More time passed between the first written accounts of government in Mesopotamia and the birth of Plato than has passed between Plato’s life and ours. And yet this “other half” of the history of political thought has barely registered in the academic field of political theory. This article seeks to “reset” the starting point of the field back to its earliest origins in ancient Sumer. Beginning then and there opens a new vista on the history of political thought by restoring questions of public administration to the foreground of the field. For while the ancient Athenians enslaved their bureaucrats and wrote almost nothing about them, the analogous actors were free and highly valued in ancient Mesopotamian political culture. It was these scribal administrators who invented the world’s first literature and written political thought. In their writings, they valorized their own administrative labor and the public goods that it alone could produce as objects of wonder and enchantment. From this vantage point, the article calls for a new research agenda that will expand political theory’s recent “rediscovery” of bureaucracy by recovering public administration as a major thematic throughline in the five-thousand-year global history of human political ideas. Understanding public administration as an integral part of large-scale human societies from the very beginning may help to counter oligarchic claims in contemporary democracies that bureaucracy is a recent alien imposition.

Something has been born which had not been born before.

—Enheduana, Hymn to the Temple of Nisaba at Eresh

Anglophone surveys of the history of political thought have traditionally taken ancient Greece as their starting point, with a special focus on democratic Athens (e.g., Cahn 2022; Cohen 2018; Klosko 2012; Ryan 2012; Steinberger 2000; Wolin 2006). In recent decades, comparative political theory (CPT) has expanded the field’s geographic scope to include other traditions of ancient political thought, especially classical Chinese and Indian political ideas (e.g., Boesche 2002; El Amine 2015; Kim 2019; Moore 2016; Pines 2009). In conjunction with work on more recent sources—including medieval Islamic political thought, modern anticolonial ideas, and much more—this horizontal expansion of the field’s vision into geographic space has effectively challenged the field’s traditional Eurocentric parochialism (Tully 2016).

However, CPT—and political theory more broadly—are also due for a vertical extension in time. The words of Confucius, Herodotus, the Buddha, and Plato were all composed or compiled after 500 BCE. We still have much to learn from these and other contemporaneous and subsequent sources, but the written record of human political ideas is much older than this. The earliest works of political theory precede the founding of Athenian democracy by over two millennia. More time passed between the first written accounts of government in Mesopotamia and the birth of Plato than has passed between Plato’s life and ours. With a few notable exceptions (e.g., Black 2016; Jeffers 2013), the “other half” of the history of political thought has barely registered in the academic field of political theory.

While there are many advantages to extending the history of political thought beyond an arbitrary cutoff around 500 BCE—not least being the intrinsic value of earlier texts—I focus on a single benefit. Like any finite academic field trying to understand an infinitely complex world, political theory invariably includes a set of “blind spots”—areas about which it remains silent that are nonetheless consequential in actual politics. Perhaps the most significant of these “blind spots” throughout the field’s contemporary history has been its silence regarding the enormous amounts of administrative labor involved in governing large-scale human societies.

Today, for example, all extant democracies are marked by the paradoxical “fact that day-to-day affairs of government are run by a strong bureaucratic state” and not by the mass of citizens themselves (Stasavage 2020, 303–4). ¹ It would be impossible for “busy people” (Elliott 2023) with jobs, school, family obligations, and other significant demands to keep track of the unrelentingly high volume of administrative decisions required to govern a modern industrialized society on a daily basis. This constant work is also far too much for a few hundred elected legislators and their staffs to do on their own. Large numbers of unelected public administrators are required to meet this labor demand, and, in performing their many jobs, they invariably take on de facto roles as administrative and even constitutional lawmakers (Cordelli 2020; Mansbridge 2018; Metzger 2013). The material significance of this background persists whether we pay attention to it or not. Without this daily labor, contemporary societies “cannot get clean air or water, enough fish in the sea, or a stable climate,” let alone maintain more prosaic public goods such as roads, schools, basic food safety, and so on (Mansbridge 2018, 301).

This universal structural feature of all modern democracies raises a set of complicated normative questions that political theory—an explicitly normative field with close disciplinary ties to the social scientific study of institutions—is uniquely well situated to investigate. Until very recently, however, political theorists were not interested in such questions. Over the course of the twentieth century, bureaucratic institutions “fell from view in political theory,” as theorists had “practically nothing to say about public administration” (Heath 2020, 1; Zacka 2022, 23). When political theorists did mention bureaucracy, their work often “remained fixated on the dangers of administrative power” (Zacka 2022, 22). It was common for political theorists to dismiss bureaucracy as “hierarchical in structure and elitist, permanent rather than fugitive—in short, anti-democratic” (Wolin 2006, 602–3). There was evidently little charm in studying institutions that had been successfully framed as “dehumanized” sites of “disenchantment” and “bureaucratic domination” (Weber 1946, 155; Weber [1921] 1978, 975).

Within the last decade, a growing number of political theorists have “rediscovered” public administration as a significant area of inquiry, opening fruitful new paths of research (Zacka 2022). This work has reevaluated bureaucracy as a site of meaningful political representation (Cordelli 2020; Jackson 2022; Mansbridge 2018); as a material foundation for collective civic action, democratization, and public power (Bagg 2024; Klein 2020; Thompson 2024); as an institutional support for substantive rights and freedoms (Bagg 2021; Emerson 2019; Rahman 2017); and as a potential site of morally significant policy implementation and affirmative civic attachment (Satkunanandan 2019; Zacka 2017).

Beginning the history of political thought at its actual beginning (rather than halfway through) helps to contextualize this work, revealing it to be something more than a specialized new research niche. Political theory’s recent “rediscovery” of bureaucracy is also a recovery of one of the major thematic throughlines in the five-thousand-year history of human political writing. To gain a comprehensive view of this throughline requires a truly global perspective. This is because the administrative “blind spot” in contemporary political theory was actively created and reproduced through the field’s traditional preoccupation with a small, geographically limited set of historical texts, from which we are still emerging.

Political thinkers in fifth- and fourth-century BCE Athens, for instance, have practically nothing to say about public administration, despite the fact that the democracy there depended on the daily administrative labor of thousands of enslaved public servants (Ismard 2017). Beginning the history of political thought with Athenian texts gives the impression that early democracy—and ancient societies more broadly—could do without bureaucracy, that amateur citizens could manage the day-to-day governing of a complex city-state through their own action alone. But they could not, and they did not. They just didn’t admit to this in writing. I return to this question below.

There is a similar silence, too, for long periods of medieval and early modern European political thought, although for a different reason: large-scale centralized administrative institutions developed millennia later there than in other regions of Afro-Eurasia (Stasavage 2020). By the end of the fifteenth century CE, for example, the chancery of celebrated Florence—the city’s main administrative institution—had a staff of only 19 (up from 11 after a reform in the late 1480s) (Brown 1979, 185–86). Early sixteenth-century European thinkers such as Machiavelli were vaguely aware that the Ottoman Empire had developed a powerful administrative system, but they knew almost nothing of detail about it until later (Malcolm 2019). And they knew even less about the massive, professionalized civil service of Ming dynasty China, which maintained sufficient administrative capacity to govern a polity of around 100 million people (Fairbank and Goldman 2006, 168).

By the time western European thinkers began to formulate highly abstract conceptions of “the state” in the seventeenth century CE in reaction to nascent projects of administrative centralization in the region, thinkers elsewhere in Afro-Eurasia had already been producing detailed descriptions of administrative ministries (e.g., Kautilya 2013), detailed accounts of bureaucratic ethics (e.g., Parkinson 1998), and detailed reform proposals for civil service training (e.g., Zhu 2019), among other administrative questions—for thousands of years. These works are not “merely” bureaucratic. They, too, investigate fundamental questions of justice, legitimate stability, the nature and provision of material public goods, and a host of other familiar topics in the history of political thought. However, they do so in ways that center administrative institutions and activities. Medieval and early modern European political texts were outliers in Afro-Eurasian political thought for not centering administrative themes, precisely because the region was highly unusual in a comparative Afro-Eurasian institutional context for its intense political fragmentation and relative lack of centralized public administration (Rosenthal and Wong 2011; Scheidel 2009; Stasavage 2020). European political thinkers understandably chose not to spend their finite time and energy writing about institutions that played only a limited role in their daily lives. ²

If we wish to understand the full range of human thinking about the value of public administration, then we have no choice but to pursue a global set of relevant historical sources. Having only just “rediscovered” public administration within the last decade, we political theorists surely have a great deal to learn from the many thinkers who have addressed these questions for thousands of years before us.

A global, five-thousand-year history of ideas about bureaucracy is evidently well beyond the scope of a single paper. Here, my more modest aim is to “reset” the history of political thought back to its actual beginning by introducing the earliest written political texts into the repertoire of the field. In doing so, I seek to establish a new starting point for subsequent research that will comprehensively recover public administration as a major institutional theme throughout the full range of recorded human political ideas. This recovery must foreground comparative institutional development as a central contextual element for historical interpretation (El Amine 2016; Simon 2020), revisiting familiar texts from this perspective while also reevaluating less familiar texts whose importance becomes more evident in this contextualization. For instance, Machiavelli’s lifetime and period of writing in the sixteenth century CE coincided almost exactly with those of the Chinese military leader and minister Wang Yangming and very nearly with the Ottoman grand vizier Lütfi Pasha. Wang and Lütfi’s highly influential, detailed writings on government and politics have much more to say about administrative institutions than Machiavelli’s writings do because—like many political actors today—they were working within bureaucracies of far greater size and power, governing political communities with exponentially larger populations. Why should we continue to study and teach the writings of a retired administrator from a small, highly unstable west Eurasian city-state in isolation from theirs, especially when very few of us live in polities of that size and shape today?

Beginning the history of political thought at the very beginning carries this institutional contextualization to the foreground and opens a new vantage point on the subsequent development of the field. Writing was first invented in ancient Sumer as an administrative recordkeeping technology. Scribes employed in the administrative offices of palaces and temples in urban Mesopotamia soon repurposed this technology to produce the world’s first literature and written political reflection. These administrative scribes were the very people who had created this technology and were the only ones who knew how to use it. It is no exaggeration to say that the earliest political theory was invented by bureaucrats.

To establish this context, I begin with a brief contrast between the enslavement of public administrators in ancient Athens and the freedom and high status of analogous actors in early Mesopotamian cities. I then turn to the earliest-known reflection on government and politics in the written record: The Instructions of Shuruppag, a contribution to the historically ubiquitous “mirrors for princes” genre, first attested near Abu Salabikh in modern Iraq between 2600 and 2500 BCE.

For institutional context, I focus on the role that The Instructions of Shuruppag played as a training exercise in the scribal school at Nippur in the early second millennium BCE. There, the Instructions had a dynamic, reciprocal relationship with the young people tasked with copying it. Just as they worked to reproduce the text, this process reproduced them as scribes capable of working in urban palace and temple administrations. While the Instructions is ostensibly about kingship, then, the text’s form, style, content, and material existence were oriented toward the reproduction not of royal character, but of administrative labor.

And the would-be scribes who copied the Instructions announced their presence explicitly at the end of the text with an exclamation of praise to Nisaba, the patron goddess of accountants, scribes, and administrators. I investigate this intertextual aspect of the Instructions by analyzing three prominent texts in which Nisaba plays a principal role: first, a pair of hymns dedicated directly to her and, second, the standard Sumerian account of the invention of writing in the epic poem Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta.

Through their association with Nisaba, Mesopotamian scribes celebrated their labor as a divinely inspired creative force with the unique ability to build cities, establish vast trade networks, and invent new forms of human social and political interaction. Their work was, for them, an object of wonder that was literally enchanted by a powerful goddess—a far cry from pervasive modern associations of public administration with “disenchantment” and a narrowing of human possibility.

Similarly, the institutional circumstances of Mesopotamian political thought contrast sharply with long-standing assumptions in political theory of an “inherent antagonism” between democracy and public administration (Wolin 1989, 195). Palace and temple administrations operated alongside kings and widespread local practices of collective decision making simultaneously (Fleming 2004; Yoffee 2005). Jacobsen (1943; 1970) famously described these latter practices as instances of “primitive democracy.” ³ Whatever we choose to call them, “local councils and assemblies did not disappear over time in Mesopotamia,” even under the most “[s]trongly centralized regimes” (Yoffee 2005, 112). I illustrate these questions of complex authority first through the appearance of a scene of public assembly in The Epic of Gilgamesh—another text with “mirrors for princes” themes—and then in conversation with A Supervisor’s Advice to a Young Scribe, the earliest instance of another historically ubiquitous genre of political thought that I call “mirrors for bureaucrats” texts.

In a concluding section, I outline what I see as the normative public implications of “resetting” the history of political thought back to its bureaucratic origins, beyond questions of political theory scholarship. Low levels of public knowledge and persistent negative framing of bureaucracy and bureaucrats have left modern democratic citizens vulnerable to dubious populist claims that dismantling hard-won, popular administrative systems of public social insurance, environmental protection, and other public goods will somehow benefit them. Coming to see administrative labor and institutions not as recent alien impositions but rather as integral parts of the five-thousand-year history of large-scale human political societies may help to mitigate this vulnerability.

The Ubiquity of Bureaucracy in the Ancient World—Even Where It Is Not Mentioned

Ancient Athenian political culture was the site of a peculiar structural contradiction; the democracy there was dependent on a form of institutional labor that it actively disavowed. At its height on the cusp of the Peloponnesian War, Attica was home to hundreds of thousands of people, many of them enslaved (Akrigg 2019). Through its busy port, Athens was integrated into an already millennia-old trade network stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indus. Government by amateur sortition and short-term rotation was simply not sufficient to manage such a large, socioeconomically complex society by itself. Longer-term sources of expertise and institutional knowledge were required, as were a host of professional personnel to facilitate the ordinary functioning of Athenian institutions both within and across sortition cycles. In short, the democracy demanded a constant stream of administrative labor.

Athenian citizens felt that this labor was beneath them. As members of the dēmos, they saw their proper realm of activity as action and rule, not accounting and recordkeeping. The Athenian solution to this tension between demand and disdain for administrative labor was slavery. ⁴ The administrative work required to govern Athens was provided by a special class of enslaved public servants called dēmosioi.

This arrangement served “to conceal the role of bureaucracy or administration inherent in the workings of the democratic system” (Ismard 2017, 34, 106). Just as women’s domestic labor was formally confined to the household (oikos), so was the city’s public administration kept apart from the polis through servitude. Unlike the oikos, however—a subject of public philosophical speculation and a common theme of Athenian drama—public administration was also segregated from the realm of free citizen men through silence. The classical political texts of ancient Athens reproduce this silence by saying effectively nothing about this indispensable institutional feature of the Athenian polis (Ismard 2017, 3, 106, 111). This silence creates a misleading impression that Athenian government was run entirely by amateur citizens themselves, through their own political labor alone.

While the Athenian democracy enslaved its public scribes, accountants, and administrators and actively disavowed their necessary labor, the equivalent actors were free and highly valued in urbanized Mesopotamian government and society. These scribal administrators used their freedom and status to experiment creatively with the technology of writing that they had invented and that they alone could produce. In doing so, they created the first human literature and written political thought—millennia before Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle.

The earliest system of proto-cuneiform pictographic writing developed endogenously with the growth of the world’s first urban government, in Sumerian Uruk, around 3400 BCE. This new technology was invented as a means of keeping track of the growing volume and complexity of administrative records required to allocate resources in a dense, large-scale political community (Veldhuis 2006, 181; Yoffee 2005, 211, 268). Proto-cuneiform did not emerge out of nothing. Instead, it developed from within practices of recordkeeping and accounting that had, by then, already existed in the region for millennia. Archaeological sites in Anatolia and the Levant show evidence of independent village-scale granaries and “administrative devices of some complexity to keep track what was in them” as early as 7400 BCE (Graeber and Wengrow 2021, 420). These earlier devices consisted mainly of clay tokens representing kinds, quantities, and transactions of agricultural products in village-scale (and in some cases larger) communities (Nissen 1986).

The first proto-cuneiform writing reflects this origin. Of the earliest clay tablets in the written record of Uruk, roughly 85% consist of administrative records, while the remaining 15% take the form of “lexical lists” of important vocabulary words that were copied and memorized by would-be administrators in the course of their scribal training (Nissen 1986, 323). Overall, around 80% of all known cuneiform texts from ancient Mesopotamia are administrative records (Jursa and Moreno García 2015, 116), and almost all of the remainder are administrative letters and other textual products of administrative training, as I show below.

The Earliest Political Writings

The most commonly attested early lexical list (Lu A) is a list of professions that likely “reflects in its internal structure the administrative hierarchy of archaic Uruk” in the late fourth millennium BCE (Englund 1998, 105; Nissen 1986). The multiple copies of this list are the first known human writings about government in the written record. But while the Uruk professions list consists of a kind of reflection on governing institutions, it conveys no normative or practical assessment, nor even an explanation or description of the offices in the hierarchy it represents. For this reason, we cannot yet call it a work of political theory.

The earliest recognizable work of political theory is instead The Instructions of Shuruppag, a “mirrors for princes” text first attested near Abu Salabikh in modern Iraq around 2600 BCE. While the Instructions is ostensibly a text about kings, it is important to recognize who had the knowledge and capacity to repurpose writing in this way. The first literary cuneiform texts to move beyond bureaucratic lists “record the perspective of the literate elite” of palace and temple offices—the indispensable “bureaucratic classes” whose members performed the daily labor involved in governing urbanized communities (Emberling 2015, 260; Michalowski 1996, 191).

The Instructions of Shuruppag takes the form of a direct address in which a king, Shuruppag, gives advice to his son, Zi-ud-sura. ⁵ The beginning of the Instructions informs us that Shuruppag is the son of Ubara-Tutu. All three names carry great significance in Sumerian mythology, especially in relation to the flood story that will later feature prominently in The Epic of Gilgamesh and, through it, the book of Genesis. In the earliest attested version of the story, found on fragmentary tablets from the late third millennium BCE, Ubara-Tutu was a mythical king of the city of Shuruppag and the last Sumerian ruler before the flood, and Zi-ud-sura was held to be the only Sumerian king to have survived the flood. In the Sumerian myth, Zi-ud-sura survives because Enki, the god of water, informs him of the divine council’s decision to destroy humanity (for reasons that are lost to us), enabling Zi-ud-sura to construct a “huge boat” full of livestock to ride out the flood (Black et al. 2004b, 214).

The Instructions of Shuruppag does not mention the flood event, and it renders the name of the city of Shuruppag into the name of a king. Nonetheless, Mesopotamian readers (and writers) would immediately recognize these references. These names infuse the advice given in the text with a deep, already ancient form of authority by connecting it to the time when the gods first created and then dramatically renewed Sumerian kingship.

At the very beginning of the Instructions, Shuruppag is introduced as a king who lived in Sumer “[i]n those days, in those far remote days, in those nights, in those faraway nights, in those years, in those far remote years” (Black et al. 2004a, 284). This is a common Sumerian literary convention with roots in oral storytelling. Shuruppag is then identified as “the wise one, who knew how to speak with elaborate words” (284). Another convention of Sumerian kingship narratives, this formula is a signal that Shuruppag wields the power of persuasion, not only physical might. After this brief third-person introduction, Shuruppag begins to address Zi-ud-sura in the second person:

My son, let me give you instructions: you should pay attention! … Do not neglect my instructions! Do not transgress the words I speak! The instructions of an old man are precious; you should comply with them! (284)

The advice that follows takes the form of apparently unconnected aphorisms covering a wide range of subject matter and styles of expression. One minute, Shuruppag warns Zi-ud-sura in a poetic voice that “[t]he eyes of the slanderer always move around as shiftily as a spindle” (286). The next minute, he tells him bluntly that he “should not beat a farmer’s son” because he will need such people to build “embankments and ditches”—pieces of critical infrastructure necessary for the irrigation of his own fields and those of the city he is to govern (288).

Along the lines of this latter advice, much of the text conveys instruction about how to manage agricultural land and other important practical questions. For example, Shuruppag tells Zi-ud-sura: “You should not locate a field on a road” or “make a well in your field,” because then “people will cause damage on it for you” as they pass through (Black et al. 2004a, 285). There are other consequential pieces of political, ethical, and legal advice as well. For example, Shuruppag insists: “You should not pass judgment when you drink beer” and “should not steal anything,” “pick a quarrel,” or “use violence” in dealings with others (285–87).

Additionally, there is a great deal of advice regarding sexual behavior. Shuruppag tells Zi-ud-sura that he “should not play around with a married young woman,” visit unmarried women (a possible reference to prostitution), or “have sex with your slave [or servant] girl” (Black et al. 2004a, 285–86). ⁶ In a culture in which hereditary monarchy had become a governing norm, some of this sexual advice has evident political implications. For example, Zi-ud-sura “should not abduct a wife” from another city because this could cause conflict—as Homer’s example of Helen’s abduction would illustrate almost two millennia later (290).

Much of the advice in the Instructions is difficult for contemporary readers to interpret. For example, “[i]t is difficult to judge what is intended as humorous or ironic” or as literal advice in the references to women in the above-cited passages because we lack virtually all of the original third-millennium context (Asher-Greve 2013, 368). We can understand the general subject matter but not always the author’s (or authors’) intended meanings. This is ultimately true as well for much of the more explicitly political advice in the text. For example, when Shuruppag advises Zi-ud-sura that “[w]ithout suburbs a city has no centre either,” it seems relatively clear that he means for him to build and maintain an expansive city (Black et al. 2004a, 291). But it is impossible to know what Shuruppag means when he tells his son that “[p]roperty is something to be expanded” there (287). Does this advice regard Zi-ud-sura’s personal royal property only, or is Shuruppag counseling him to work toward the prosperity of the city as a whole? We simply cannot know.

Mirrors for Princes … and Bureaucrats

The Instructions of Shuruppag contains many more pieces of advice, but I am less interested in every element of its precise content than in the question of what the advice might be doing within its own context. While we can know very little about the original Early Dynastic period context, The Instructions of Shuruppag is an especially well-attested text with multiple surviving copies because of what would happen to it in subsequent centuries. By the early second millennium BCE, it had been adopted as part of the education curriculum in the scribal training center at Nippur, an important city in the Babylonian sphere of influence.

By then, a common curriculum had developed for training young people to work as scribes in urban temple and palace administrations. A central part of this curriculum was the Decad, a set of ten texts that students had to copy and memorize at an advanced stage of their scribal training—much as students had to copy the list of professions during the Uruk period centuries earlier. This is why multiple tablets with these texts have survived to the present; there were a great many copies made. The Instructions of Shuruppag was a common text for scribes-in-training to copy and memorize alongside the Decad texts, hence its transmission to the present.

We know much more about this context for The Instructions of Shuruppag than we do about the original Early Dynastic period context. In these later circumstances, while the literary setting of the Instructions portrays an intergenerational communication of royal advice, the substantive content of the advice is oriented institutionally toward the linguistic formation of junior administrators, not the ethical formation of princes. This is one of the characteristic features of the earliest human political writing. We simply do not know how this written literature may have been used (if at all) in other social contexts. The only readership we know about are the scribal students themselves and their supervisors. Furthermore, in copying these texts, scribes actively “participated in the development of compositions,” as they “sometimes tended to modify the original” (Lion 2011, 96). For this reason, “it does not make much sense to search for unique, original authors” but rather to see most cuneiform texts as products of anonymous collective authorship over time (96).

These texts therefore exist in a dynamic, reciprocal relationship with their authors. While scribes-in-training were occupied in producing and reproducing a wide range of lexical lists, dialogues, hymns, poems, and “mirrors for princes” texts, this very process was producing and reproducing them as scribes. The main purpose of the iterated act of copying, recomposing, and sharing these texts was to inscribe, irreversibly, the capacities and habitus of their new social and political role within the bodies and minds of young people.

What did young scribes-in-training learn by copying, memorizing, producing, and reproducing The Instructions of Shuruppag? While there is no way of knowing for sure, it is possible that this text was included in the Nippur curriculum more for its vocabulary and literary style than for the content of its advice. Remember that Shuruppag is first introduced as “the wise one who knew how to speak in elaborate words” (Black et al. 2004a, 284). In copying the text, young scribes-in-training would learn how to write in similarly elaborate words.

For example, when Shuruppag tells Zi-ud-sura not to speak arrogantly, he does not just say: Do not speak arrogantly. Instead, he says: “To speak arrogantly is like an abscess: a herb that makes the stomach sick” (Black et al. 2004a, 288). And when Shuruppag explains the institution of the palace to Zi-ud-sura, he does not merely state that a palace is an important center of communication, revenue, exchange, and command. Instead, he tells Zi-ud-sura that a palace is “like a mighty river: its middle is goring bulls; what flows in is never enough to fill it, and what flows out can never be stopped” (287). There are many other examples of powerful metaphorical language in the text.

At first glance, this kind of language training may seem tangential to an administrative education. Copying lexical lists would surely be sufficient preparation for recordkeeping, for example. However, recordkeeping was not the only task assigned to Mesopotamian scribes. Letter writing is another well-attested aspect of their labor, with some archaeological sites yielding thousands of letters (Fleming 2004, 2; Michalowski 2011). Much of this material belongs straightforwardly to an administrative milieu. For example, we have record of ubiquitous “letter-orders” arranging transfers of grain and other goods for a variety of purposes (Michalowski 2011, 14–15). Other letters convey diplomatic and trade correspondence between rulers and other elites, often across significant distances. These, too, would be drafted by scribes, as most rulers probably lacked the requisite skill to write complex letters persuasively (Charpin 2010, 18). From the perspective of the scribal trainees themselves, “correspondence constituted one of the principal uses of writing,” and “the letter was emblematic” of the specialized role they sought to inhabit (Charpin 2010, 22; Michalowski 2011, 19). Developing a capacity to write eloquently would be integral to this role.

In addition to their form and style, the conceptual content of the texts to be copied surely also contributed to the socialization of young scribes-in-training—in this case by reinforcing the norms of the political culture that they would soon enter as junior administrators. Michalowski (1996, 192) refers to this dynamic as “the ideological indoctrination of future bureaucrats.”

In this context, it is significant that The Instructions of Shuruppag presents and valorizes four key social hierarchies of ancient Mesopotamian society. The first social hierarchy is the norm of hereditary patriarchal kingship, conveyed in the framing of the text as advice from a king to his son. Palace scribes would surely be expected to support and reinscribe this norm through their subsequent labor. Second, The Instructions of Shuruppag reinforces an evaluative framework that holds the urban society of the lowland floodplain to be superior to the nomadic societies of the highlands to the north. Shuruppag tells Zi-ud-sura that the gods there “are maneaters” and “do not build houses there as men do; they do not build cities there as men do” (Black et al. 2004a, 291). In other words, they are not like us.

Third, the Instructions affirms coercive labor practices of some form. ⁷ Shuruppag tells Zi-ud-sura: “You should … bring down a foreign slave from the mountains, or you should bring somebody from a place where he is an alien,” rather than purchasing or capturing people closer to home. This is because the foreigner will be socially isolated, having no nearby exit option to incentivize escape or stimulate (further) resentment at his condition. “He does not belong to any family, so he does not want to go to his family; he does not belong to any city, so he does not want to go to his city … he will not be presumptuous with you,” Shuruppag says (Black et al. 2004a, 288).

This raises the question of labor practices in general in the text. At one point, Shuruppag tells Zi-ud-sura: “If you hire a worker, he will share the bread bag with you; he eats with you from the same bag, and finishes up the bag with you.” When the period of the labor contract ends, the hired laborer will then say, “I have to live on something,” at which point he may “serve at the palace” (Black et al. 2004a, 287). Does this latter move imply the possibility of social mobility among free laborers? Perhaps. It is impossible to know. It could be a customary aphorism about the general importance of sharing bread that was included in the Instructions as a literary formula, or it could be meant as literal advice to treat free, contracted workers well and allow them opportunities for social advancement. As with many passages in Sumerian texts, it is impossible to pin down a single meaning without further context.

The fourth social hierarchy in the Instructions regards gender roles. ⁸ In some passages, Shuruppag appears to affirm a gendered spatial hierarchy within the household. It is important to find a “reliable woman for a good household,” he says, and while “[y]ou tell your son to come to your home; you tell your daughter to go to her women’s quarters” (Black et al. 2004a, 287). Without further context, it is not clear whether this passage refers to a strict system of domestic segregation or simply to independent living quarters for men and women with some daily interchange between them (Bartash 2014, 18).

In other passages, Shuruppag reinforces the high status of some women. He tells Zi-ud-sura: “You should not speak arrogantly to your mother” or “question the words of your mother,” and “you should be obedient to your elder sister as if she were your mother” (Black et al. 2004a, 290). These forms of respect may of course be compatible with patriarchal norms within the family and broader society, such as institutionalized male primogeniture. ⁹ But it is still significant that Shuruppag presents (at least some) women as being due significant respect, prestige, and obedience. Even “[t]he wet-nurse in the women’s quarters” holds importance because she “determines the fate of their lord” (290).

We know very little about the lives of women in coercive labor roles or of lower-class free women in ancient Mesopotamia. However, thanks to administrative records, we know that elite Mesopotamian women regularly “engaged in trade, lending and borrowing, and acquired property” (Halton and Svärd 2017, 17). While elite women were “probably under the jurisdiction of the male head of the family” in most instances, at least formally, they nonetheless appear to have had access to a wide range of public social and economic interactions (17).

And while “[t]he profession of scribe is much better attested for men than for women” in the written record, we have significant evidence of women scribes and administrators, albeit “in limited numbers, over a long period from the end of the third millennium to the second quarter of the first [BCE]” in multiple Mesopotamian cities (Halton and Svärd 2017, 34; Lion 2011, 98). For example, we can see women’s names on ration lists accounting for the distribution of bread, beer, flour, oil, wool, and other goods to scribes as payment for their labor (Lion 2011, 99). And all available evidence indicates that “[t]he education of girls” in these instances was “exactly identical in content and level of difficulty with that of the boys” (Lion 2011, 100). In sum, the operation of patriarchal gender norms was complicated in ancient Mesopotamia. In reproducing a wide variety of texts, young scribes-in-training—boys and girls—would be socialized into these norms, along with their complexity.

“Righteous Woman of Unmatched Mind”

Administrative matters enter explicitly into the content of the Instructions in its very last lines. There, the anonymous narrator returns to exclaim: “Praise be to the lady who completed the great tablets, the maiden Nisaba, that Shuruppag, the son of Ubara-Tutu, gave his instructions!” (Black et al. 2004a, 291). This is a common ending of ancient Mesopotamian texts. Half of the texts of the Decad end with a final line praising the goddess, and an entire hymn to Nisaba is included in the Tetrad—four texts often taught in a sequence prior to the Decad. Nisaba features prominently in many other texts as well, including praise poems to kings, another common form of “mirrors for princes” text (e.g., Robson 2007, 232). In praising Nisaba, the scribes producing and reproducing all of these texts announce their presence explicitly, as she is the patron goddess of writing, scribes, and administration—in short, the goddess of bureaucrats.

In this context, I want to look at two hymns addressed directly to Nisaba because they give us a sense of how Mesopotamian scribes valorized their activity through this divine association. The first is a brief hymn attributed to Enheduana, often called “the world’s first author” because she is the earliest historical figure to have texts attributed to her name. ¹⁰

Enheduana’s hymn to the temple of Nisaba at Eresh is the last of a series of 42 hymns to temples in different cities of the Akkadian Empire, founded by her father, Sargon, around 2300 BCE. The Eresh hymn begins with a description of the temple itself: “House of Stars. House of Lapis Lazuli, sparkling bright, you open the way to all the lands” (Enheduana 2023, 92–93). The hymn then describes the “great goddess Nisaba” as a “[r]ighteous woman of unmatched mind … born to the upright stylus.” In parallel with the material of her temple, Nisaba is depicted “consulting a tablet of lapis lazuli” (92–93).

This set of images, common in depictions of Nisaba, conveys two meanings simultaneously. First, writing implements often appear in Sumerian mythology as sparkling or twinkling like stars (Klein and Sefati 2013). This signals their high value in the divine world and therefore also, by association, in the human world, even when they are made of common dried reed (the cuneiform stylus) or clay (the tablet) (Robson 2007, 222, 239). Nisaba is often described in similar terms as a “woman sparkling with joy” (quoted in Robson 2007, 232). Her tablet is evidently part of the same package of meaning. With sparkling pyrite streaks set against its dark ultramarine color, lapis lazuli resembles the night sky and is assigned great value.

But the tablet also conveys another, related meaning. While its form resembles the night sky, its content bears a chart of the heavens. On this tablet, Nisaba “measures the heavens and outlines the earth.” With the information her tablet conveys, she is depicted “giving guidance to all the lands” (Enheduana 2023, 92–93).

Enheduana’s hymn to the temple of Nisaba ends with a pair of lines that are different from the rest. They announce: “The weaver of the tablet was Enheduana. / My king! Something has been born which had not been born before” (Enheduana 2023, 93). What is this new, unprecedented something?

Here again, there are multiple possible meanings. First, something might refer to the hymn itself or to the entire collection of hymns. In this reading, the hymn’s final line celebrates Enheduana’s generative use of the power of writing to produce new forms of expression—new words, new literatures, and new invocations of gods, temples, and cities in the service of a new multicity political community.

The broader scribal context also points to a second possible interpretation. In copying this line, a student would be acknowledging that they had created a new tablet of writing that “had not been born before” and that through this work they were being reborn as someone who would go on to create many more such tablets.

But the scribal context also points to a third possible interpretation. Recall that Nisaba “measures the heavens and outlines the earth” with the information inscribed on her tablet and then uses this knowledge to give “guidance to all the lands.” What kinds of guidance does she give? To answer, we might look to the longer, anonymous hymn to Nisaba included in the Tetrad.

This hymn begins by invoking the common image of Nisaba as the divine “[l]ady colored like the stars of heaven, holding a lapis lazuli tablet” (Black et al. 2004c, 293). She is the “wise sage of the gods,” the “chief scribe” of the sky god An, and the “record-keeper of Enlil,” the chief god of the Sumerian pantheon (293).

The hymn then depicts Nisaba’s appointment of a priest “to establish bread offerings where none existed, and to pour forth great libations of alcohol” to appease Enlil (Black et al. 2004c, 293). The priest “approaches the maiden Nisaba in prayer” and opens “Nisaba’s house of learning,” placing “the lapis lazuli tablet on her knees, for her to consult the holy tablet of the heavenly stars” (293).

These bread and alcohol offerings—presented as something new (“where none existed”)—point to Nisaba’s other divine assignment. She is not only the goddess of writing, scribes, and administrators; she is also the goddess of grain and grain distribution (Asher-Greve and Westenholz 2013, 24, 43). These two aspects of Nisaba’s divine portfolio are evidently related and suggest that Nisaba may have had origins as a harvest goddess. In this theory of her development, Nisaba would have come to oversee human practices of accounting and writing as these technologies developed to record inventories and transactions of grain and related products in the fourth millennium BCE.

With these attributes of Nisaba in mind, the hymn depicts the goddess ritually cleansing herself “to make barley and flax grow in the furrows, so that excellent corn can be admired” (Black et al. 2004c, 293). She makes “flax shoot forth” and “barley shoot forth at the harvest” for the festival of Enlil (293). By consulting the “heavenly stars” on her sparkling tablet, Nisaba holds the knowledge of seasons, rivers, rain, and soil required to plan and keep record of large-scale agricultural production and distribution. Because she alone holds this knowledge, the hymn beseeches her:

O Nisaba, good woman, fair woman, woman born in the mountains! Nisaba, may you be the butter in the cattle-pen, may you be the cream in the sheepfold, may you be keeper of the seal in the treasury, may you be a good steward in the palace, may you be a heaper up of grain among the grain piles and in the grain stores! (294)

This passage reveals the hymn to be a celebration, not only of the goal of material abundance, but also of the indispensable role of wise public administration as a means to this end. It is meticulous recordkeeping “in the treasury” that enables the palaces and temples of ancient urban governments to plan, collect, manage, and distribute stores of grain and other food. In placing all of these functions together, the hymn reminds readers (and writers) that this bounty and the planned social insurance against famine that it enables is only possible with effective administration in the treasury and granaries of temples and palaces.

“Something Has Been Born Which Had Not Been Born Before”

It is worth pausing here to note elements of resonance between these millennia-old ideas and emergent work on public administration in contemporary political theory. Satkunanandan (2019, 14, 18) has argued that we ought to attend to the “passional possibilities of bureaucratic experience”—to the affects we undergo in the course of our encounters with bureaucracy—to carry us beyond a narrow Weberian frame in which public administration appears only as a “dehumanized” site of passionless rational calculation and drab “disenchantment” (Weber 1946, 155; Weber [1921] 1978, 975). Satkunanandan builds upon Bennett’s (2001, 105–6) contention that the “ambiguous charm” of bureaucratic complexity might sometimes be a source of “strange pleasure” and that positive “bureaucratic entanglements” might even become “occasions for enchantment.” Even Graeber (2015)—a strident critic of the dangers of modern bureaucratic domination—concedes that we may sometimes experience “joys of bureaucracy” when we “play” successfully within the rules of the administrative games we are obliged to enter. For Graeber, the sheer scale and power of bureaucratized systems such as postal services can even inspire a sense of “wonder” (153; cf. Thompson 2024).

These contemporary accounts focus on the affective experiences of people encountering administrative institutions from the outside. The Mesopotamian scribes who produced the earliest written political thought are, by contrast, writing from the perspective of people working (or aspiring to work) inside administrative institutions. And their accounts of their own labor are brimming with the “passional possibilities” of administrative experience.

Their administrative capacities are quite literally enchanted by a powerful goddess “sparkling with joy” at the world their labor was creating. In the view of these scribes, the knowledge they alone could amass, record, and communicate was what made new, expanding urban ways of life possible—in part through the heaping “of grain among the grain piles and in the grain stores” that they administered. This generative capacity appears as an evident object of wonder and passionate praise in their writings. And they understood this power to extend far beyond a single granary or even a single city.

We see this latter sentiment expressed clearly in the principal account of the invention of writing in ancient Mesopotamian literature, in the epic poem Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta. The poem begins with a description of the great city of Unug-Kulab (an idealized Sumerian city modeled on Uruk). The city is endowed with natural “[o]pulence,” including regular “carp floods” and “rains that bring forth dappled wheat” (Vanstiphout 2003, 57). Despite the city’s great material abundance, the poem tells us that “there was no trading” and “no commerce” in the region; gold, “silver, copper, tin, blocks of lapis lazuli … were not yet brought down from the highlands” (57). The poem is therefore set in a time before the establishment of the dense Bronze Age trade networks that would stretch from the Mediterranean to the Indus.

The action gets underway as Enmerkar, king of Unug-Kulab, begins to covet the vast mineral wealth of Aratta, located beyond the mountains to the east. With the blessing of the goddess Inanna, Enmerkar sends an envoy to the lord of Aratta with threats to level his city if he does not agree to “work gold and silver for my sake” and provide “translucent smooth lapis lazuli” to improve Innana’s temple in Unug-Kulab (Vanstiphout 2003, 59). The lord of Aratta responds with a challenge for Enmerkar: he must send a large grain supply over the mountains to Aratta in loose-knit nets without spilling even a single grain.

As Enmerkar is confounded by this challenge, “Nisaba, the Lady of broad understanding” appears before him with her “shining tablet of clay [and] the sharpened reed of the assembly” of the gods, to open “for him her holy house of wisdom” (Vanstiphout 2003, 75). Nisaba instructs Enmerkar to water the grain and wait for the first green sprouts to grow long enough to hold the grain together in the nets—and it works.

But the lord of Aratta does not comply with Enmerkar’s initial demand and instead issues a second challenge: to produce a scepter out of no substance known to humans. Again, Enmerkar cleverly wins the challenge only to be met with a third: to send a dog of no known color to fight with a dog belonging to the lord of Aratta. Enmerkar invents cuneiform writing in the course of this third challenge as a means of transmitting complex information over time and space.

When Enmerkar’s envoy tells him about the lord of Aratta’s final demand, Enmerkar dictates an elaborate message to him in response. Enmerkar’s speech is “very grand, its meaning very deep” (Vanstiphout 2003, 85). But “[t]he messenger’s mouth was too heavy,” and “he could not repeat” the king’s complicated words (85). Seeing his envoy’s difficulty, “[t]he lord of Kulab patted some clay and put the words on it as on a tablet” (85). Enmerkar’s move is unprecedented in human affairs: “Before that day, there had been no putting words on clay. … The lord of Kulab had put words as on a tablet—so it was!” (85). It was not unprecedented in the realm of the gods, however; Enmerkar had learned this skill from his earlier encounter with Nisaba, when she appeared before him with her “shining tablet of clay” and “sharpened reed.”

When the lord of Aratta receives Enmerkar’s tablet from his envoy, it is his turn to be confounded. To him, “[t]he spoken words were mere wedges” (Vanstiphout 2003, 85). His “brow darkened, and he “kept looking at the tablet,” but he could make no sense of it (85). The poem ends when Inanna commands both kings to establish a relationship between their cities based on trade, not force and plunder. “When you have instituted [trade] with the lord of Aratta,” Inanna tells Enmerkar, then the “people of Aratta” will “[h]ave as their task the trading of gold and lapis lazuli” and “the fashioning of golden fruits and fruity bushes” to send in return for his abundant grain surplus—all enabled and recorded through the invention of writing (91).

As with The Instructions of Shuruppag, most of the tablets transmitting Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta have been found in the scribal training center at Nippur from the Old Babylonian period, though the epic was likely composed much earlier (Vanstiphout 2003, 54–55). In reproducing this tablet, young scribes-in-training would learn that their unique capacity to keep written records and communicate across distance was integral to the creation not only of great cities, but also of the vast trading networks binding cities and other regions together across thousands of miles.

“In Our Assembly We Place the King in Your Care”

Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta identifies Nisaba’s stylus as “the sharpened reed of the assembly” of the gods—a reference to Nisaba’s role as recordkeeper of that divine body. The Sumerian gods are indeed often depicted as meeting in an assembly (Jacobsen 1943, 167–68). But the gods are not the only ones who convene public meetings; ancient Mesopotamian literature also includes multiple references to assemblies of various kinds among mortals.

Perhaps the most well known of these is the scene of an assembly in the Babylonian version of The Epic of Gilgamesh. There, before Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu travel to the cedar forest to fight its giant guardian Humbaba, Gilgamesh convenes a public assembly in Uruk where he addresses first the elders of the city and then the “young men of Uruk” (George 2020, 19–20). This is a scene of open deliberation, as Gilgamesh first seeks the assent of the assembled “crowd” of the people “sitting before him,” while Enkidu argues against the enterprise due to its great danger (19). The elders initially agree with Enkidu, but they ultimately assent to the journey, having been persuaded by Gilgamesh’s response to them, which is unfortunately lost to us. (The precise role of the “young men of Uruk” is even less clear.) The elders then send the pair off, telling Enkidu: “In our assembly we place the King in your care” (22).

There is broad agreement among scholars that divine and human public meetings in ancient Mesopotamian literature reflect actual political practices, attested also in litigation documents, administrative records, and letters (Fleming 2004; Yoffee 2005, 109–12). Dynastic rulers routinely interacted with local collective decision-making bodies “constituted by community members and traditional leaders” who “exercised judicial privileges, settl[ed] disputes among community members … and could stand in opposition to the palace and royal court” (Yoffee 2005, 61). These institutional relationships often existed in “a lively, fluid interaction of collective and exclusionary modes, neither one operating independently of the other” (Fleming 2004, 19, 171).

Studies of ancient institutions often gloss over this complexity. For example, Stasavage (2020, 9) has recently posited an opposition between “early democracy”—direct democracy in assemblies or councils—and the “autocratic alternative,” in which the government of a single ruler “was aided by the construction of a state bureaucracy.” In this view, Athenian democracy only “existed in lieu of a state bureaucracy,” while the development of administrative institutions blocked the establishment of democracy elsewhere (Stasavage 2020, 4–5, 306).

But the ancient world was far more complicated than this. The Athenian democracy required a great deal of public administrative labor to function, as we have seen. And “collective and individual [royal] power” in ancient Mesopotamia coexisted as “two competing and perhaps even complementary elements of a single political system” operating together, often in nonhierarchical relationships (Fleming 2004, 235; Yoffee 2005, 112). Images of ancient Mesopotamian kingdoms “dominated by ineffably and irresistibly powerful rulers, who controlled, or even monopolized, all means of production and the distribution of goods and services” through their scribal administrators belong largely to the realm of historical “myth” (Yoffee 2005, 196; cf. Graeber and Wengrow 2021). ¹¹

Mesopotamian scribes working in palace and temple administrations were therefore not inherently part of an “autocratic alternative” to local practices of collective deliberation and decision making. Instead, they labored in political circumstances of significant institutional fluidity, amid complex relationships of authority. This complexity cuts against the long-standing assumption in political theory of an “inherent antagonism” between public administration and forms of collective decision making associated with democracy (Wolin 1989, 195; Wolin 2006, 603). Such antagonism is of course possible, but ancient Mesopotamian political experience suggests that it is neither inevitable nor historically universal. Recognizing less antagonistic relationships between these institutional forms in the past may help to free us to imagine new, productive relationships between their analogs in the present.

Beyond references to assemblies in Mesopotamian literature, the complexity of authority within institutions of scribal practice appears as a principal theme of a dialogue titled A Supervisor’s Advice to a Young Scribe, first attested in the early third millennium BCE. The dialogue is probably the earliest instance of a genre of political writing that would later grow ubiquitous throughout much of Afro-Eurasia: advice books for public administrators.

A Supervisor’s Advice to a Young Scribe begins as an older, more experienced scribe attempts to impart lessons to a junior counterpart, and it ends with a comic reversal in which the recipient of the lessons confidently expresses his competence in the face of his supervisor’s unsolicited advice.

The supervisor begins the dialogue with a series of platitudes that are almost surely meant to appear ridiculous. Back in his day, the supervisor says, “I did not depart from my teacher’s instructions” but went to work “[l]ike a springing reed” whenever told to do so (Black et al. 2004d, 278). Because the supervisor always obeyed his teacher, “[h]e made me eloquent with words” and “focused my eyes on the rules which guide a man with a task” (278). The supervisor then tells his junior colleague to “pay attention,” to “defer to the powers that be,” and not to “reject the pleasurable company of a mentor or his assistant,” because “once you have come into contact with such great brains, you will make your own words more worthy” (278).

This last line sets up the comic effect when the junior administrator “humbly” responds by telling his supervisor, in effect, to shut up. Let me “give you a response to what you have just recited like a magic spell, and a rebuttal to your charming ditty delivered in a bellow,” the junior scribe answers. “Don’t make me out to be an ignoramus,” he says. The supervisor may have opened his eyes “like a puppy” and “made me into a human being” with the capacity to wield the power of writing, “[b]ut why do you go on outlining rules for me as if I were a shirker? Anyone hearing your words would feel insulted!” (Black et al. 2004d, 278).

The junior scribe then reminds his supervisor how effective he has been. He has arranged the daily work of “subordinates in your household” and has “kept them happy with rations, clothing, and oil rations” (Black et al. 2004d, 279). ¹² His competent management has freed the supervisor from having to see to this labor himself. The junior scribe has also performed offerings to the gods for his supervisor “on the appropriate days,” managed the work in his fields, and done much more besides. The scribe ends his response by telling his supervisor boldly that “those who undervalue themselves are ignored by you—know that I want to make this clear to you” (279–80).

Impressed, the supervisor is won over immediately. “You who as a youth sat at my words have pleased my heart,” he says, adding that now “[y]ou can turn your hand against any man.” The supervisor then launches into a series of invocations of Nisaba, who “has placed in your hand the honor of being a teacher” (Black et al. 2004d, 280). Through the “majesty of Nisaba … the fate determined for you will be changed and so you will be generously blessed” with the worldly benefits that flow from eloquence and wisdom (280). The dialogue ends with a standard statement of praise to the goddess: “Praise be to Nisaba who has brought order to [cities?] … and fixed districts in their boundaries, the lady whose divine powers … have no rival!” (280).

Like the other Mesopotamian texts cited here, copies of A Supervisor’s Advice to a Young Scribe have survived to the present because the dialogue was used as a scribal training exercise. In addition to their amusement at the comic reversal the dialogue portrays, young scribes-in-training would likely have learned something substantial from the content of the text. Crucially, the dialogue portrays junior scribes not as mindless cogs in a rationalistic bureaucratic machine, but rather as bearers of significant agency. Unlike later Athenian bureaucrats, these Mesopotamian scribes were free and highly visible in the literature that they alone could produce. If deliberation and disagreement with supervisors was strictly forbidden or feared in their places of work, then it is highly unlikely that a prominent dialogue clearly celebrating these experiences would have been included in scribal training programs. The dialogue conveys an expectation that administrative roles will involve some deliberation and continued agency, even among junior scribes.

Conclusion

As I outlined in the introduction to this paper, my purpose in turning to the earliest works of written political thought has been to “reset” the traditional historical starting point of the field and to lay the groundwork for future research that will recover public administration as a major thematic throughline within a global history of political thought, one that considers the full range of recorded political ideas. I contend that political theory’s recent “rediscovery” of public administration has already begun this recovery, though most of this work has (until now) only focused on European and North American sources from the last two centuries to the present.

I have also sought to show that ancient Mesopotamian political thought is not just an inert starting point for a future historical recovery project. Instead, as we have seen, the work of Mesopotamian administrative scribes directly addresses multiple themes and questions that feature prominently in the emergent literature on bureaucracy in contemporary political theory. These include the affective attachments that arise from greater attunement to the public goods that administrative power alone can generate; the compatibility of administrative institutions with ongoing practices of collective public decision making; and the agency, power, and character of bureaucrats themselves. What other historical connections and possibilities will emerge as the field begins to work on the vast untapped global textual resources that have addressed these and other questions over the last five thousand years?

Recentering public administration within the history of political thought may bring significant public benefit as well. Empirical studies have demonstrated consistently that citizens in contemporary democracies possess limited knowledge of the administrative institutions and policies that shape their daily lives (e.g., Mettler 2011). This “disconnect” (Mettler 2018) is indeed a long-standing feature of many modern democratic societies that goes back centuries (Thompson 2024). In this low-information environment, citizens are often left to “fill in the blanks” with demonstrably false narratives about how bureaucratized policies work (Thorson 2024). These circumstances leave many citizens vulnerable to populist political actors’ facile promises to effect a “deconstruction of the administrative state” on behalf of “the people”—as part of a coalition of oligarchic interests that would instead quietly dismantle overwhelmingly popular bureaucratic systems providing public social insurance, public education, environmental protection, and other majoritarian public goods (Rucker and Costa 2017).

By actively framing public administration as an inherently “antidemocratic” agent of bloodless disenchantment and dehumanizing, rationalistic domination, political theory has traditionally done little to mitigate this public vulnerability—and has perhaps contributed to it, even if it has done so inadvertently. After decades of negative framing and outright neglect, the field inevitably “lack[ed] a language for speaking about bureaucracy in a rich way” (Satkunanandan 2019, 14). This is why political theory’s recent “rediscovery” of bureaucracy bears potential public significance. Scholars have begun to recognize the danger of theorizing public goods while ignoring or dismissing the administrative labor that often makes them possible.

Recovering the field’s millennia-long engagement with ideas of public administration is part of this wider collective project. My hope is that by publicly revealing administrative labor to be an ordinary feature of the five-thousand-year history of large-scale human societies—compatible with forms of collective public decision making from the very beginning—we may help to ameliorate the well-documented “disconnect” in public perceptions of administrative institutions in the present. The wonders of the ancient world were produced in large part through administrative labor—as Mesopotamian scribes were well aware—and this is no less true of many of the significant wonders of the contemporary world. From this perspective, the work of CPT may be less a matter of learning about “other” political cultures than finally learning about our own participation in our species’ ongoing five-millennia experience of public administration.