Officio Historica is an Imperial organization, part of the Adeptus Administratum, which oversees official historical records. It is located on Terra in the Imperial Palace near Library Sanctus for its members are frequently brainwashed and the information they have collected tranferred into the vast library of forbidden lore. Work of Officio Historica was considered so prestigeous that an Ordo of the Holy Inquisition - Ordo Scriptus - was created in M38 to oversee it.
After the resurrection of Primarch Roboute Guilliman in M42, most of the resources of Officio Historica have been repurposed for the use of Logos Historica Veritas. An act strongly opposed by the Inquisition.
Organization[]
Officio Historica is divided into sub-divisions which collect and order certain types of historical records. Some sub-divisions tend to overlap in their areas of expertise, as tends to be the case within Imperial organizations. Some completely different Imperial offices, most notably the historians of the Adeptus Astartes Historium - adepts of an organization which collects information from the Adeptus Astartes chapters and is located in Athenaeum on Terra - also overlap with the duties of Officio Historica which creates a lot of tension between the adepts in the Imperial Palace and causes a lot of headache to the Inquisition which hopelessly tries to gather and censor the recorded history of Imperial worlds to its liking.
Sub-divisions[]
As described before, Officio Historica is divided into subdivision by the topics of histories it collects. Sub-divisions are titled for example "Officio Historica, sub. Retrorsus (Questor Imperialis)". Some of these sub-divisions are:
- Retrorsus - members of sub. Retrorsus gather and collect information from worlds that are technologically significantly below the Imperial standard, referring to history of feudal, feral and (usually) knight worlds. More specific assignments of the adepts within sub. are following:
- Barbarus - pre-industrial worlds such as feral and feudal ones, but most importantly the feral worlds.
- Questor Imperialis - the Imperial knight worlds. Records and histories from the knight worlds allied to Mechanicus are collected discreetly with permission and by senior members only.
- Feel free to add your own...
Ranks and titles[]
Adepts of the Officio Historica are collectively known as "historitors" while historitors are actually the most prestigeous posts within the office who enjoy significant autonomy. It is the historitors duty to travel the stars and collect the chronicles, manuscripts, dataslates and parchments, and to translate them to binary form to be sent back to Terra. They rely on many other Imperial organizations in order to accomplish their duties, Orders Dialogous assisting frequently with translations, Missionaria Galaxia carrying historitors to new worlds, Adeptus Arbites watching over historitors who dig secrets from within data-archives of the hives and so on. Adepts of Officio Historica sharing the colloqual name of those who work in the Historical Revision Unit causes misunderstandings and wrongly appointed messages and data-transfer all the time.
Officio Historica is governed by a Chartophylax of the Officio Historica who holds the rank of a master within the Adeptus Administratum. Officers overseeing sub-divisions are known as Chartolarix sub-division (ie. Chartolarix Retrorsus).
Sources[]
- 1: Codex: Inquisition (6th edition), pg. 18