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The Office in History

The word “office” comes from the Latin word officium. It has other equivalents in the romance languages. Originally, an office was not a place, but a profession or a position. It is still used in this sense today when we speak of someone having the “office” of a particular position, such as president. In such a case, the “office” is portable, in that it is something ascribed to a person rather than a location. Rome can be considered the first society that developed an elaborate bureaucracy, and consequently offices as we know them today, mainly because of its legal system. This degree of bureaucracy would not be equaled for centuries in the West, long after the fall of Rome, which even reverted partially to illiteracy, while a more sophisticated administrative culture prevailed in the East under Byzantium and Islamic influence.

In classical antiquity, offices were usually part of a palace or a large temple. Typically, there was a room where scrolls were kept and scribes did their work. Such a room was sometimes called a library, especially by archaeologists and the general press. Scrolls are often seen as an early form of books. In fact, these rooms were true offices since the scrolls were used for record keeping and other management functions such as treaties and edicts and not for poetry or works of fiction.

In the medieval chancery, government letters were written and laws were copied on the administration of the kingdom. The chancery often had walls full of pigeonholes, the equivalent of bookshelves, constructed to hold rolled-up pieces of parchment for safekeeping or reference. These government offices did not change much during the Renaissance with the introduction of printing.

Preindustrial paintings and tapestries often show people in their private offices handling books or writing on scrolls of parchment. In these early forms of offices, before the invention of the printing press, there appears to be a thin line between a private office and a private library, since books were read or written in the same space at the same desk or table. General accounting and private letters were also written in the same space.