Ancient Egypt and Soviet Russia

“When one reflects on the immense number of transactions, in miscellaneous items ranging from rolls of papyrus or hoes to sacks of grain or baskets of fruit and jars of honey, which were entailed in measuring, assessing, enumerating, collecting, moving, checking, and receipting in and storing; and further reflects that these items had to be checked out again to craftsmen, labourers, soldiers, scribes, sailors, and so forth, so entailing these innumerable separate activities all over again, but in reverse order; when one reflects on this, the parallel that must spring to mind can be only that of the Soviet economy in the ‘war communism’ period before national bank credits and accountancy brought some relief to the system, except that the Egyptian government did not yet set production targets for the economy (which was to come, in Ptolemaic times). <…>
In one respect Egypt was even more of a command economy than the USSR under Stalin. His government could count on the forced labour of some 16 million prisoners in the labour camps of the Gulag; but the Egyptian government had been accustomed from time immemorial to the conscript labour of the entire population”

From “History of Government from the Earliest Time”, the book I’m currently reading.

It's a bit chilling to find out that the very first states in the written history were totalitarian socialist economies of the Soviet type.