The history of the emergence and development of the institute of political documents in the Ancient World: forms and functions of documents

The article examines the history of the emergence and development of the political documents in the Middle East, which became the cradle of such early human civilizations as Sumer, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Judea and others. Particular attention is paid to proto-documents – the first symbolic forms of transmitting information significant for human communities. The purpose of the research is to study the first historical forms of political communication based on written proto-documents, the content of which was recorded in cuneiform. The objectives of the study are to analyze the forms and functions of proto-documents as tools for maintaining political and religious power, as well as regulating social relations in ancient societies. The study covers the period from the pre-literate era of the aforementioned states of the Middle East to the capture of these territories first by Ancient Greece and later by the Roman Empire in 70 AD. The methodological basis of the study included such methods as analysis and synthesis, historical-comparative method, method of hypotheses and analogies, synergetic method. And also the methods of semiotics, which the Russian historian Yu. M. Lotman included in the theory of signs and sign systems, which studies the properties of communication systems and signs used in the process of human communication. The scientific novelty of the study lies, firstly, in the fact that until now the problems associated with the study of the history of the emergence and development of the institution of political documents in the Ancient World have not been purposefully studied, and secondly, an attempt was made to establish an inextricable connection between the evolution of political documents in this historical period and the processes of state formation, the complication of the social structure, the emergence of family and private property institutions in ancient society, as well as the development of law and ideology. We believe that the first written documents arose not only as a way of preserving general social information, but, above all, as a means of consolidating, formalizing and legitimizing power in the context of an increasingly complex social organization. Thus, a political document becomes the most important element of the institutional order, since power in ancient (archaic) societies needed public approval, that is, a public demonstration.