Your Parcel Has Left Sardis: If There Had Been Parcel Delivery in Antiquity

“Your parcel is out for delivery.” Anyone who reads that sentence stays at home all day. Evening comes, the doorbell never rings, and a new message drops onto the screen: “Delivery attempted: recipient not at address.” Yet the recipient has spent the whole day by the door in their pyjamas. In this part of the series, let us look at the ancient world through a parcel tracking screen. We will see that both the thrill and the frustration of waiting for a delivery are thousands of years old.

The Persians: neither snow nor rain

How did the Persian couriers work?

According to Herodotus, no mortal travelled faster than the Persian couriers. The system worked like a relay race. Along the road, as many horses and men were posted as there were days in the journey. Each courier rode only one day’s stretch and handed the message to the next. In Herodotus’s words, neither snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness could stop these couriers.¹

Today this sentence is carved on the facade of a great post office building in New York: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” The United States Postal Service has no official motto, but many people believe these words are its motto.² So the world’s most famous tribute to postal workers is really a note a historian wrote about the Persians. Had the Persian couriers left a “recipient not at address” slip, Herodotus would probably have recorded that too.

The Royal Road: the Sardis sorting centre

Where did the Royal Road run?

The most famous road of the Persians was the Royal Road, which ran from Sardis, the capital of Lydia, to Susa, one of the centres of the empire. The ruins of Sardis stand today in the Salihli district of Manisa in western Türkiye. According to Herodotus, there were 111 stations along this road, and a traveller on foot could walk it in 90 days. The stations were well kept, and the road was safe from end to end.³

In today’s language, every station was a sorting centre. If there had been a tracking screen, it would have looked like this: “Your parcel has left the Sardis sorting centre.” Then the same line for days: “Your parcel is at the sorting centre.” At least Herodotus tells us from the start that the road takes 90 days. He may have been the first to give an “estimated delivery date”.

Kültepe: parcels by donkey and clay envelopes

What do the Kültepe tablets tell us?

Kültepe near Kayseri, known in antiquity as Kanesh, was a great trading centre in the 20th and 19th centuries BC. Merchants from the city of Assur brought tin and textiles here by donkey caravan and received gold and silver in return. About 23,500 tablets have been found in the excavations. In 2015 these tablets were inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register.⁴

The merchants placed their letters inside clay envelopes and sealed them. To read a letter you had to break the envelope, so it was immediately clear whether the shipment had been opened on the way.⁵ The ancient counterpart of today’s “why did my parcel arrive crushed?” complaint was probably a merchant whose envelope arrived cracked.

The familiar voice of people waiting for a delivery can be heard in the letters too. An Assyrian woman investor named Ahaha writes that the silver she expected from a caravan financed with her money has not arrived. She asks her brother to make sure the silver comes with the next caravan and begs: “Take care to act so that I will not be ruined!”⁶ She could count as a four-thousand-year-old colleague of everyone who has ever called customer service to ask “where is my parcel?”

Augustus: for those who want to talk to the courier

How was Rome's postal system established?

Rome’s state post was organised by Augustus. According to Suetonius, Augustus wanted to learn quickly what was happening in the provinces. At first he stationed young men at short intervals along the military roads, and letters were passed from hand to hand. Then he changed the arrangement and switched to a system using carriages. The reason was interesting: when the same person carried the dispatch all the way, they could also be questioned if necessary.⁷

Augustus had fulfilled the greatest dream of today’s parcel customer: being able to talk to the person who brings the package. The rest of us are still listening to the “please hold while we transfer you to an agent” music.

What has changed?

The Persian courier, the donkey caravan of Kültepe and the post carriage of Augustus were all looking for an answer to the same question: how to get something far away quickly and safely. The only thing that has changed is that, while we wait, we can now watch a little van move across a map on the screen. Then again, that van sometimes stays in the same place for three days.

Notes

1. Herodotus, Histories, 8.98. ↩

2. The words were adapted from an English translation of Herodotus and carved on the facade of the James Farley Post Office in New York. ↩

3. Herodotus, Histories, 5.52–53. ↩

4. On the world of the Kültepe merchants, see Larsen (2015). ↩

5. On clay envelopes and seals, see Larsen (2015). ↩

6. Michel (2020), pp. 411–414. ↩

7. Suetonius, Augustus, 49.3. ↩

References

1. Herodotus. (1920–1925). The Persian Wars (A. D. Godley, Trans.; Loeb Classical Library 117–120). Harvard University Press. (5.52–53, 8.98)
2. Larsen, M. T. (2015). Ancient Kanesh: A merchant colony in Bronze Age Anatolia. Cambridge University Press.
3. Michel, C. (2020). Women of Assur and Kanesh: Texts from the archives of Assyrian merchants. SBL Press.
4. Suetonius. (1914). Lives of the Caesars, Volume I (J. C. Rolfe, Trans.; Loeb Classical Library 31). Harvard University Press. (Augustus 49)