A History of Passports Surprisingly passports as we know them haven’t been around all that long. But something with the same purpose — a document to let someone travel safely through another country — has been around for thousands of years. The first mention of something similar to a passport is actually in the Tanach in the Book of Nechemiah. The navi Nechemiah was traveling from ancient Persia to Judah to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem for which the Persian king granted him letters requesting safe passage. In Britain the earliest mention of such “letters of safe conduct ” as they became known was in an act of Parliament during Henry V’s reign dated 1414. By the mid-1800s most countries were using some form of passport but when the railroads made travel so much easier the passport system couldn’t handle the huge numbers of travelers and so passports were abolished in most countries. 

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