Most people in the world are required to have a passport when they travel internationally.

Today there is an international regime covering how passports are to be issued and honored between countries.

However, in the past, the system was much more informal, and if you go back far enough, there was no system in place at all.

Learn more about passports, how they work, and how they came to be, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Before we get into the origin of passports, there's one overarching fact that you should know. A long time ago,

actually not even that long ago, people didn't travel very much. The average person would have

never traveled beyond about 20 miles from where they were born.

Perhaps if you were in the military or worked on a ship or were a merchant, you might get to travel much further,

but the average person would never do that.

Travel was relatively rare,

and if you did find yourself in a foreign land ruled by a foreign king,

you'd probably arouse suspicion.

You'd literally be a stranger in a strange land, probably speaking a strange

language. This would be a problem if you were on official business for your king. Someone on official

business would need something to present to

foreign officials to indicate that they were on a legitimate diplomatic mission.

It's quite probable that very ancient civilizations use documents for official

travel between them.

The effectiveness of these documents was probably due to a lack of general literacy, meaning they

were hard to forge, and the use of official royal seals.

The earliest recorded use of a travel document

actually comes from the Hebrew Bible. In the book of Nehemiah Chapter 2

7 and 9 it says quote, if it pleases the king, may I have letters to the governors of

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