Egyptian state clerks were criminalized for messy register keeping.

Evidence

The clean, blank page which was sequentially numbered and neatly bound in a register was a symbol of the new power of the state: self-assured, rational, and consistent. Scribbling and scrawling in government registers, like losing them, were considered a crime, an affront to the authority of the state. For the most part this is how the registers of Mehmed Ali’s government look. Occasionally, however, we come across a case of a mistake, an omission, a word that is crossed out, that betrays the very logic of the text and through which a deeper reality comes across challenging the very image that the bureaucracy had striven to maintain of itself. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 957

Categorization

• XREF: This materiality of state paperwork connects to how the Manhattan Project archive in other readings encodes authority through cleanliness and order.
• QUESTION: What do the crossed-out entries in these registers actually reveal when examined individually?