At its height, the Seleukid Empire (311/10-63 BCE) encompassed vast tracts of territory from the western edges of Turkey to the borders of India and from Armenia to Bahrain. It was the largest of the Hellenistic Empires that emerged following the death of Alexander and the subsequent period of infighting among his generals. However, it has left behind far less evidence of its administration than its size would initially imply when compared to its smaller rival, the Ptolemaic Empire. Scholars have sought to explain how this polity managed to govern its subject territories and peoples and the character of its rule while facing the challenges of minimal evidence due to inconsistencies in the archaeological record and the loss of crucial documents due to the perishability of the media they were written on. My dissertation contributes to this conversation on Seleukid governance by examining the evidence for the presence of Seleukid archives of administrative records and information. In doing so, it shifts the scholarly conversation away from solely extractive readings of archives and state documents (i.e., charting the wealth derived from their registration), and instead emphasizes how ancient states, in their limited capacity compared to modern ones, relied on bilateral negotiations with subjects and local record-keeping institutions to build official procedures, archival practices, and ultimately notions of law and order. While little exists in the way of state documentation on papyrus and parchment, surviving clay sealings and bullae that once secured documents, cuneiform documentation from Babylonia, archival structures, and epigraphic evidence shows that document production and storage were much more intrinsic to Seleukid imperial order than has been previously argued. Using these sources, this project sketches the development of Seleukid archival systems and the nature of the documentation held within to better grasp how such systems and information contributed to the experiences of subjects within the empire. Afterwards, it argues that archival information was actively employed by both state and subject to form growing notions of order and law based around the act of documentation and archivization. These observations lead to a reconsideration the nature of Seleukid governance to better account for the creation of normative legislation and, more broadly, how material culture in antiquity contributed to the formation of imperial structures and aided in the creation of a shared notion of legality.