The passport seems to us something taken for granted: a document is obtained in one's teenage years, tickets are bought with it, and adulthood is confirmed through it. Meanwhile, universal passportization is a phenomenon of the twentieth century. For most of human history, documents resembling a passport were a rare privilege: they were issued to ambassadors, merchants, military personnel, and those whom the state especially wanted to be able to identify on the road.
It is important to distinguish between two things. A travel document permits a person to cross a border or travel through foreign lands. An identity document confirms who is standing before you and links this person to the state. The modern passport combines both functions, but historically the first appeared considerably earlier than the second.
The Ancient World: The Right to a Safe Road
One of the earliest descriptions of a document performing the functions of a passport is contained in the Old Testament, in the Book of Nehemiah. Nehemiah, who served under the Persian king Artaxerxes I, asked permission to set out for Judea in order to rebuild Jerusalem. The king not only let him go but also issued a written order to the governors of the royal provinces beyond the Euphrates to ensure Nehemiah a safe passage. This took place around the middle of the fifth century BCE.
The principle here is already quite "passport-like": a paper from a strong authority obliges foreign officials to let the holder through and not to hinder him. In itself, such a document was not an identity document in the modern sense—it was protected not by a photograph but by the authority of the king.
Similar mechanisms existed in ancient China as well. Systems of registration documents that made it possible to control the movement of the population took shape as early as the Warring States period (fifth to third centuries BCE) and were developed under the Han dynasty, which began in 206 BCE. Such certificates recorded the holder's name, age, height, and distinguishing marks: after all, photographs did not exist, and so identity was described in words.
In the Roman Empire, free movement within the country and departure beyond its borders were regulated differently. Soldiers were issued military diplomas and leave permits, while travelers and diplomats received letters in the name of the authorities. Later, rulers of neighboring states began to exchange similar documents, guaranteeing the safety of their envoys and merchants.
In Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, roughly 3–4 thousand years ago, couriers and merchants carried small clay tablets with cuneiform writing. They indicated who the person was, where he came from, where he was going, and what he was carrying; sometimes the document contained an order not to detain the bearer.
The Middle Ages: A Charter That Cannot Be Forged
In medieval Europe, the main prototype of the passport was the letter of safe conduct — "safe passage." It was issued by a ruler or city authorities and usually was valid only along a specific route, for a specific period, and for a specific purpose. A merchant traveled to a fair, an ambassador to negotiations, a pilgrim to a shrine; without such a paper, the journey was fraught with the risk of being detained as a spy or a vagrant.
In English historical literature, the starting point of passports is often cited as the parliamentary act of 1414 under Henry V: foreigners present in the country were required to have documents ensuring their inviolability. In the mid-sixteenth century, under Henry VIII, the Privy Council was already systematically issuing official travel documents.
Curiously, the word "passport" came from French: passer — "to pass" and port — "port," "harbor," "gate." Literally, it is "passage through the gate." For a long time the passport was closer to what is today called a visa or an exit permit than to an identity document.
In the Russian lands, a similar role was played by travel charters. Already in the treaty of Prince Igor with Byzantium in 945, the procedure for the stay of Russian merchants and envoys in Constantinople was stipulated. Reports of Novgorod travel charters date to the end of the thirteenth century, and by the end of the fifteenth century they were used both by foreigners arriving in Russia and by Russian subjects preparing to go abroad.
The Empire: The Passport as an Instrument of Registration
With the strengthening of states and the development of absolutism, the passport became less a protection for the traveler than an instrument of control over a state's own subjects.
In Russia under Peter I, "travel letters" became widespread. They were needed above all so that the authorities could track the movements of peasants and recruits and prevent tax evasion and escapes. The passport system of the Russian Empire was largely built around the taxable estates: a peasant leaving for the city to earn money had to have a valid document, which was issued for a limited term and extended.
That is, within the country the passport often meant not "I am a citizen with rights" but "I am registered, I am attached to a place, someone is answerable for me." This function proved extraordinarily tenacious: in Russia the passport system was abolished only after the revolution of 1917, and it was brought back—in a different form—in the 1930s.
The Twentieth Century: The Passport Becomes Universal
The turning point came after the First World War. Before it, in many European countries one could cross a border with minimal formalities, and sometimes with no documents at all. The war brought mass screening of foreigners, spy mania, and flows of refugees. States introduced mandatory foreign passports and visa checks, which proved convenient even after the peace.
A separate chapter is the Nansen passport. In 1922, at the initiative of Fridtjof Nansen, then working at the League of Nations, an international travel document was introduced for stateless persons, above all for Russian émigrés. It did not grant citizenship but allowed them to live and travel lawfully. By the end of the 1920s it was recognized by dozens of states. It was the prototype of modern refugee documents.
In parallel, international standardization began: League of Nations conferences in the 1920s discussed uniform passport forms and visa rules. Later the standards were developed by the International Civil Aviation Organization—it is to that body that we owe the machine-readable line at the bottom of the page and the unified logic of electronic passports.
In the USSR, a unified passport system was introduced by a decree of 27 December 1932. Passports were issued from the age of 16 to residents of cities and workers' settlements and to workers in industry and transport. But the collective-farm peasantry remained without passports: this seriously restricted freedom of movement and was tied to the residence-permit system. Only from 1974 did passports begin to be issued to collective farmers everywhere.
The Photograph, the Chip, and Biometrics
For a long time the only "biometric" element of the passport was a verbal description: "hair fair, eyes gray, face clean." The photograph appeared in documents only at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. In a number of countries mandatory photographs were introduced during the First World War, and in the USSR photographs in the passport became mandatory in 1937.
The next leap came almost sixty years later. In 1998 Malaysia began issuing the first full-fledged biometric passports: inside the cover was a microchip with the holder's digital data, above all the facial image. Today such documents are in use in most countries of the world, and identification is increasingly built on a combination of face, fingerprints, and secure cryptography.
The Bottom Line
The history of the passport is a movement from a personal privilege to a universal obligation, and then to a civic instrument. A tsar's letter protected an envoy from the arbitrariness of foreign officials. A medieval charter allowed a merchant to reach a fair. An imperial document kept a peasant in place. And only in the twentieth century did the passport become what we know it as today: confirmation that you exist for the state under a specific name, date of birth, and number.
