Chapar Khaneh

A (Template:Langx, , transl. 'courier house') was a postal service station in the Achaemenid Empire.

Established by Cyrus the Great and later developed by Darius the Great, the Achaemenid Empire's extensive postal service network served as the principal royal method of communication across most of the major cities of the ancient Near East. Each was mainly located along the Royal Road, an ancient highway that was reorganized and rebuilt by Darius the Great to facilitate the rapid movement of Persian couriers between Sardis (now Turkey) in the west and Susa (now Iran) in the east.

The couriers, also known as () in Greek, alternated in stations a day's ride apart along the Royal Road. The riders were exclusively in service of the Great King, and the network allowed for messages to be transported from Susa to Sardis (2,700 km or 1,700 mi) in a matter of just nine days, as opposed to roughly 90 days on foot. Thus, a was fundamentally an express courier; he would be provided with fresh supplies and horses at each station on his route, allowing him to greatly accelerate his journey by eliminating any delays associated with procuring supplies on his own or waiting for his horse to rest.

Known as the Template:Langx in Latin, the ancient Persians' postal system was hailed in the Greco-Roman world for its remarkable efficiency, consequently being adapted as the cursus publicus (lit.Template:Thinsp'the public way') in the Roman Empire. was used for the postal service, which provided official communication in the Ottoman Empire, and for the accommodation points of the army.

In Herodotus

Herodotus, in about 440 BC, describes the Chapar Khaneh in the Histories. His description of the Royal Road and the various Chapar Khanehs along it is in Book V:

In Book VIII, he describes the messengers:

Now there is nothing mortal which accomplishes a journey with more speed than these messengers, so skillfully has this been invented by the Persians: for they say that according to the number of days of which the entire journey consists, so many horses and men are set at intervals, each man and horse appointed for a day's journey. These neither snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness of night prevents from accomplishing each one the task proposed to him, with the very utmost speed. The first then rides and delivers the message with which he is charged to the second, and the second to the third; and after that it goes through them handed from one to the other, as in the torch-race among the Hellenes, which they perform for Hephaestus. This kind of running of their horses the Persians call Angarium.

A sentence of this description of the , translated as "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds," is famously inscribed on the James A. Farley Building in New York City, former main United States Postal Service branch in New York City.

See also

• Royal Road, an ancient highway system in the Achaemenid Empire

Further reading

• Paton, James (1907). "Archaeological Discussions". American Journal of Archaeology. 11 (2): 197–251. doi:10.2307/496936. JSTOR 496936. S2CID 245264868.
• Campell, Brian; Tritle, Lawrence (2013). The Oxford Handbook of Warfare in the Classical World. Oxford University Press. p. 501. ISBN 978-0195304657.