Graeber / Wengrow 419: "when early regimes [...] base their domination of exclusive access to forms of knowledge, these are often not the kinds of knowledge we ourselves would consider particularly practical (the shamanic, psychotropic revelations that seem to have inspired the builders of Chavin de Huántar would be one such example). In fact, the first forms of functional administration, in the sense of keeping archives of lists, ledgers, accounting procedures, overseers, audits and files, seem to emerge in precisely these kinds of ritual contexts: in Mesopotamian temples, Egyptian ancestor cults, Chinese oracle readings and so forth."
From this, they conclude that "bureaucracy did not begin simply as a practical solution to provlems of information management, when human societies advanced beyond a particular threshold of scale and complexity"