While the study of diplomatics and archival practices based on documents from medieval Egypt has been a steady feature of scholarship on the Middle East for many decades -- with the important work of S.D. Goitein and others -- that of documents from medieval Iran, Afghanistan, and the wider Islamicate East is still in its infancy. This paper will focus on documents from Afghanistan written in the 12th and 13th centuries CE which I call "the Bamiyan Papers" and that are being studied by the Invisible East program in Oxford. These are largely administrative and legal documents that deal with issues of tax and the internal functioning of the state, including the police and fiscal departments. I explore, also, the phenomenon of institutional memory: the production of internal institutional documents, their processing for action, archiving, and eventual shedding. We will see through the often-hazy screen of large institutions, and gain insight into how state employees carried out their daily work in ways no narrative history can. The paper will underline the importance of largely underused and publicly and digitally available documents—such as, internal memos, dispatches to the field, and petitions to headquarters—as sources for understanding the history of rural administration and institutions in the region.