A cross-cultural historical overview of meritocracy in bureaucracy

Early bureaucracies used informal methods for recruiting officials. Positions were filled with eunuchs, passed from father to son, or were bought and sold. When did societies start implementing examination systems for selecting bureaucrats? Here's a survey of #Seshat data (1/9) pic.twitter.com/imTyjvw0CL

— Seshat (@SeshatDatabank) August 1, 2018

That's the first tweet in this thread. It manages to illustrate this in various different parts of the globe - with Europe making up more a minor part of this with examples from, e.g., China, India, and the Persian Achaemenid as well as Ottoman empires. If more data was available I suspect you'd find much the same elsewhere.