Source: Departure Herald-Detail, Wikimedia

Many of the most important inventions of humankind come from China: tea, gunpowder, paper, the compass. However, during China's Han Dynasty a more abstract idea was pioneered: bureaucracy. What exactly is a bureaucracy? Let's look at an example of one: your school.

Drag the school officials below to the appropriate spot in the hierarchy.

Obviously, a principal cannot run an entire school all on his own. There is too much going on! That is why your school has a vice principal or assistant principals. Governments work pretty much the same way, except that government bureaucracies are much, much bigger!

In the United States government, each branch is divided up into hundreds of different agencies lead by officials who are in charge of some specific aspect of governing, such as the Department of Education or the Department of Defense.

You might be thinking "Well duh, isn't this kind of obvious? That doesn't seem like something that needed to be invented." It seems that way to us, but think back to the earliest days of humanity when we were hunter-gatherers. Societies were too small to really warrant a bureaucracy. Even early civilizations were mostly the size of small villages. Our societies were more or less decentralized and did not require a large hierarchy of officials.

It wasn't until large civilizations such as Han China and Ancient Rome that humanity started to build large, hierarchical bureaucracies. Let's learn some more about Han China!