It may hardly seem worthwhile to make special note of the bureaucracy of the Uzdumalian empire, given that no large organization, much less any empire of its extraordinary reach, could possibly be maintained without specialists, functionaries, and other such officials who oversee a particular area of administration---in a word, without a bureaucracy and bureaucrats.  But we must attend not just to the facts of the matter, that there was a bureaucracy, and that, as to its functioning, it was much like any other. For more important than what is the case is what people think is the case, more important than how something arose, how they think it arose, and so on, and if we attend to this lesson, the only conclusion we can draw is that in the early and middle periods of the Uzdumalian Empire, there was no bureaucracy at all, and that the rise of a bureaucracy as such occurred in tandem with the corrupting influence of Targhandism.

What could this possibly mean? Do we not, after all, have records from the earliest periods attesting to people acting in official capacities, referring matters to offices, and all the rest? Why, we even have comedies in which characters complain about the time it takes to get anything official done: the surest criterion for actually existing bureaucracies that one could ask for.  Naturally my thesis is hard to demonstrate, and may seem implausible in the face of these records, but we can see what I mean most easily if we consider the well-known case of the Artificer of Graves, the architectural collective of the early middle (commonly "High") period.  I grant that the case for the Artificer's being a collective and not, first and foremost, an individual, has not yet gained universal acceptance among scholars, but the best and most scrupulously examined research indicates that it was, though in addition to being a collective it was also the title of the leader of the collective.

Though the above-referenced article claims that very few of the collective's architectural works remain, that claim rests on making the common assumption that the workshop itself was not one of the Artificer's creations, an opinion born entirely of elitism.  No halfway architecturally sensitive inquirer can fail to remark the consistency of the workshop itself with the other surviving works, or the genius with which it was designed.  The shop itself reflects the principles along which the collective was (unconsciously?) organized: the spaces are permeable and adjustable, there are very few areas closed off entirely except by doorways, and structural elements flow into each other seemingly seamlessly.  There is a natural progression from one area to the next, exactly as the elements being worked upon require. The entire workshop is one entity, and so too was the collective. The "Artificer of Graves" is often referred to as an individual, even among some contemporary documents, but this is not because it was one person; rather, it was because there was such cohesion among the members of the collective that their entire will was as if one.  The leader did not so much guide the collective as express it.  A carpenter or machinist was not a carpenter or machinist employed by the Artificer, but was (as recently discovered documents have it) a "Carpenter of the Artificer" or "Machinist of the Artificer", the "of" signifying not possession but literal membership, componentship.

Nor was this an isolated phenomenon! Workshops like this were entirely common in the early and middle periods; the Artificer of Graves was merely the best and best-known. And imperial offices were organized (they would not of course say that they were "organized", as if from without) along similar lines. A bureaucrat did not see himself as separate from his job or his job as separate from the empire itself as a whole, and others looked upon him in the exact same way that he did.  Part and parcel with a religion that worshipped trees and employed animals in its symbolism, to be, as we would now scornfully put it, a "cog in the wheel" was the ideal.  An essential part of a bureaucracy are experts and functionaries who are in some sense detachable from the context of those they serve, but there was no part of that in the Uzdumalian Empire while it flourished.  During those periods, an official was thought of first in terms of the whole, and secondarily in terms of himself: thus, to them, there was no bureaucracy.

See also:

Artificer of Graves

Nature worship

Imperial organization