The History of Passports

Passports as we know them are a relatively recent invention. But travel documents have been around since ancient times. Whether those documents got you into a different country was often a crapshoot. Like many other systems, the birth point of the passport boils down to how you define one. And how you define borders, visas, and rules of passage. The journey to the standardized passport was a long and crooked one, since nations don't like to be told what to do, yet most still want their citizens to have freedom of travel. Even today, passport rules are different depending on who you are and where you are going. Not only that, but the rules can change suddenly. Let's hope you are not in an international airport lounge when that happens.