Topic: communications (1)

• ConceptThe Royal Road

  The great overland route and courier relay that bound the Achaemenid empire together: the road of stations and inns Herodotus walked in his mind from Sardis to Susa, and the mounted post along it that the Greeks called the angareion, carrying the King's word across a world in a matter of days. It was at once the empire's nervous system and its leash on distant satraps: the same arteries that let the King reward and provision a province let him also recall and destroy an over-mighty servant. The Greek picture of a single measured highway is real but partial; the Persepolis Fortification tablets show the road-system from the inside, as a lived bureaucracy of sealed travel-passes and issued rations.