‘Spreadsheets of empire’: red tape goes back 4,000 years, say scientists after Iraq finds

Part of one of the hundreds of administrative tablets discovered at the Sumerian site of Girsu. Photograph: Alberto Giannese/The Girsu Project/British Museum

The red tape of government bureaucracy spans more than 4,000 years, according to new finds from the cradle of the world’s civilisations, Mesopotamia.

Hundreds of administrative tablets – the earliest physical evidence of the first empire in recorded history – have been discovered by archaeologists from the British Museum and Iraq. These texts detail the minutiae of government and reveal a complex bureaucracy – the red tape of an ancient civilisation.