Reflection

Little by little my understanding of Public Administration is getting

better, only after my first day with Dr. Julia De Torres-Unger, our professor.
My previous perspective of Public Administration was only limited to
government responsibilities. After our first day of discussion, I started to
understand that Public Administration is part of our everyday life routine as
we counteract with our family, friends, colleagues, workmates, and other
people. Public Administration is a pre-historic way back before the time of
Christianity. Cooperation by the group of people must be realized to reach
their common goal or objective, it is not a one- man army in nature.
 Public Administration has an ancient origin. I’ve learned that during
ancient times, Egyptians and Greeks organized public affairs by the office,
and the principal office holders were regarded as being principally responsible
for administering justice, maintaining law and order, and providing plenty. The
Roman developed a more sophisticated system under their empire, creating
distinct administrative hierarchies for justice. military affairs, finance, and
taxation, foreign affairs, and lateral affairs, each with its principal officers of
state. Philip Jones associate curator and keeper of the Babylonian section at
the Penn Museum in Philadelphia.
 Other ancient origin of Public Administration was the Sumerians, people of Southern
Mesopotamia, were seems to be the first in terms of Public Administration. They have
flourished thousands of years ago (4100 – 1750 BCE) between the Tigris and Euphrates
rivers in what today is called Southern Iraq. Built a civilization that in some ways was the
ancient equivalent of Silicon Valley. As the late historian Samuel Noah Kramer “The
people of Sumerian had an unusual flair for Technological invention.” They invented new
technologies and perfected the large-scale of existing ones. In the process, they
transformed how humans cultivated food, built dwellings, communicated, and kept track
of information and time. Their creativity was driven to an extent by their land's lack of
natural resources with only a few trees, almost no stone metal that forced them to make
hi-genius use of materials such as clay (the plastic of the ancient world). They used it to
make everything from bricks to pottery to tablets for writing.
Examples of their work way back 2800BC:

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Bowl
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Pictographs that create a record of their food supplies.

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The scribes used sharpened reeds to scratch the symbols into wet clay which
dried to form tablets, their system of writings became known as cuneiform,
it was borrowed by subsequent civilizations and used across
the Middle East for 2,000 years.
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Scale model of a simple two-wheeled chariot.
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Plow- used by them in farming.
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Molds – for making bricks.
 As Kramer writes, the Sumerians have an identity that drove them to dream
big and think ingeniously, “Spiritually and psychologically, they laid great stress
on ambition and success, preeminence and prestige honor and recognition.”
Their innovations gradually spread and led to the development of the modern
technologically advanced world that lived in today.

The Sumerians people sets a high value on the individual and his
achievements, there was overriding factor which fastered a strong spirit of
cooperations among individuals and communities alike:
 In summary, as we started to discuss the subject of Public Administration, I
was not aware that this specific subject matter has a very broad spectrum of
how it started. It was an eye-opener to me that these things have a great and
rich historical start. As I come to understand more of the information about
Public Administration, I get excited about the upcoming discussion that I can
definitely use in my everyday work at the office.

References:

World History Encyclopedia

Britanica Encyclopedia