The Achaemenid Royal Road - Infrastructure of Empire
The Persian Royal Road ran some 2,700 kilometres from Sardis in western Anatolia to Susa, and a royal courier could cover it in about a week. Darius I rebuilt and extended it as part of a system rather than as a piece of engineering. The empire he inherited from Cyrus and Cambyses stretched from the Aegean to the Indus and was governed through satraps who were far enough from the capital to be tempted, and the road was the instrument that made central control possible over that distance. Herodotus describes 111 posting stations at intervals of a day's ride, each with fresh horses and lodging, and it is his account of the couriers riding in relay that supplied the sentence about neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night, which an American post office later borrowed. An ordinary traveller took about ninety days for the journey; the royal post took seven to nine. The road was policed, provisioned and had bridges and ferries, and the tablets found at Persepolis record the rations issued to authorised travellers against sealed documents, which is a passport system in clay. It carried tribute, armies, satraps' correspondence and the standard gold daric. Alexander used it to move east in 334 BC, which is the standard irony of imperial infrastructure. Its successors ran along much of the same ground for two thousand years, and stretches of it were later absorbed into the routes now loosely called the Silk Road. The Achaemenids also standardised what moved along it: a gold coinage accepted across the empire, Aramaic as the language of administration from Egypt to Bactria, and a calendar of tribute due from each satrapy. The road is the physical expression of the first empire that tried to govern rather than merely to extract.
- Year: 500 BCE
- Category: Economic
