#mail route

[notified3849-blog]

Fantastic mail route mushroom.

[triviaproofing]

#1228: “There was a “pony express” in Persia many centuries before Christ. Riders on this ancient circuit, wearing special colored headbands, delivered the mails across the vast stretch of Asia Minor, sometimes riding for hundreds of miles without a break. The Greek historian Herodotus has left us this description of them: “Nothing mortal travels as fast as these Persian messengers. The entire plan is a Persian invention… along the whole line of road there are men stationed with horses in number equal to the number of days which the journey takes… The first rider delivers his dispatch to the second, and the second passes it to the third, and so it is borne from hand to hand along the whole line, like the light in a torch race.”

True.

I didn’t see anything about headbands, but Herodotus writes about them in his Histories (Book 8, chapter 98, for the curious). For each day of the journey, there was one man and one horse. The mail was passed along for each day on the route to the right man, like in a torch race. The couriers used the Royal Road, an ancient highway in Persia.