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The history of record keeping goes much further back than many of us think. We may wrongly assume that if humans couldn’t write or had no access to paper and ink, there was no way for them to keep track of anything important, but we’d be wrong.
It’s a hugely fascinating journey from the Ancient Sumerians to the present day, where we’re seeing advanced technology such as Blockchain making ledgers more secure than they’ve ever been before. So, if you’re a Crypto geek wanting to safely access the latest PEPE coin price chart on Binance, or a bookworm who is fascinated by how we arrived at the current technologically advanced stage we find ourselves in, it’s time to investigate the history of record keeping.
Ancient archives
Archives were invented over 6000 years ago – it was the ancient Sumerians who used a script called cuneiform which they impressed onto clay tablets, who brought the idea of recording things properly into practice. They used these tablets to record property ownership and commercial activity…
However, we must travel 2000 years further forward when we see the Egyptians expand on this idea and use an archive to keep secure military records so they could keep tabs on their population of soldiers. All was well with this for almost 1000 years – and it was only then that a revolt spread through Egypt, and the first act of rebellion against record keeping took place as citizens burnt down a record office as they felt officials had no right to be the “custodian of hated property rights”.
First examples of public records
The first case of a public archive of records as we’d recognize it today happened in Rome during the year 509 BC but it was Alexander the Great some 200 years later who expressed a belief in the power of the written record. After an event in which his chancery tent, containing all his records was razed to the ground, he made his staff reconstruct everything!
Post-classical record keeping
We now fast forward through to those crazy Byzantine dudes and the year 529 AD. It was Justinian I who used record keeping to try and unite his empire – and wrote a code with the assistance of archived documents to emphasize the importance of archiving records of importance in a public repository. He believed this was the best way of guaranteeing integrity and authenticity.
The similarly crazy Venerable Bede sat down during the long days and nights of the Dark Ages to write the Ecclesiastical History of the English people in 731 AD. Here, he drew on the somewhat piecemeal records that already existed in England, and an interesting point to note is that at this particular point in time, the church had a personal method of warding off thieves! Placed at the end of every document or manuscript, there was a curse or prayer added to ward off tricky criminals.
Record keeping in more modern times
Unfortunately, as we reach the time of the French Revolution, a good number of archives were attacked or destroyed. Angry mobs felt that record keeping was a source of oppression and in 1790, France created a new National Archive. This space was opened to the public and held accountable by the Assembly. In time, this became the world’s first centrally controlled archive system and many countries followed suit over the following century.
In the USA their centralized archive was established with the creation of the Act of April 28, 1810. This Act removed every office apart from those of the Department of State, War, and Navy from the building. It also created safe and secure fireproof rooms to ensure that any records deposited there were free from harm (as far as possible). However, in 1877 a fire gutted part of the interior department building and at the time President Hayes decided he must act and – appointed a special commission to investigate what had happened.
They decided that many scrolls of paper were obsolete and no longer needed – and which were causing safety issues, not to mention making the building a more combustible prospect. 10 years later, Senator Francis Cockrell wrote a separate bill called “An act to authorize and provide for the disposition of useless papers in the Executive Departments”.
The last century in the archives
During the 1930s scientists discovered that the current methods of producing paper led to it decaying rapidly. A chemist by the name of William Barrow developed a form of conservation that assisted with paper deacidification – and it was also around this time that the USA finally got its own National Archive. However, this last century has probably seen more issues with record-keeping than any other! Journals such as The Washington Post alongside other respected news sites like Binance have highlighted these issues. The former highlighted an issue with the decidedly flaky record-keeping of the military in the USA – noting it has been full of inaccuracies and gaps for a long time. It was in the 1970s that Americans began to store cataloged material in machine-readable format and it led to the advancements we see today in digital record keeping and, in the 21st century, blockchain ledgers. It’s hugely exciting to see how record-keeping might develop over the coming years. We’ve come a long way since those clay tablets.