Royal Road

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For other uses, see Royal Road (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with Royal Roads.
The map of Achaemenid Empire and the section of the Royal Road noted by Herodotus

The Royal Road was an ancient

Persian king Darius the Great (Darius I) of the first (Achaemenid) Persian Empire in the 5th century BC.[1] Darius I built the road to facilitate rapid communication on the western part of his large empire from Susa to Sardis.[2] Mounted couriers of the Angarium were supposed to travel 1,677 miles (2,699 km) from Susa to Sardis in nine days; the journey took ninety days on foot.[3]

Course

The course of the road has been reconstructed from the writings of

archeological
research, and other historical records.

History

Because the road did not follow the shortest nor the easiest route between the most important cities of the Persian Empire, archeologists believe the westernmost sections of the road may have originally been built by the

Great Khorasan Road, are coincident with the major trade route known as the Silk Road
.

However, Darius I improved the existing road network into the Royal Road as it is recognized today. A later improvement by the Romans of a road bed with a hard-packed gravelled surface of 6.25 m width held within a stone curbing was found in a stretch near Gordium[6] and connecting the parts together in a unified whole stretching some 1677 miles, primarily as a post road, with a hundred and eleven posting stations maintained with a supply of fresh horses, a quick mode of communication using relays of swift mounted messengers, the kingdom's pirradazis.

In 1961, under a grant from the American Philosophical Society, S. F. Starr traced the stretch of road from Gordium to Sardis, identifying river crossings by ancient bridge abutments.[7] It was maintained by personal guards.[clarification needed]

Legacy

The

James Farley Post Office in New York and is sometimes thought of as the United States Postal Service creed
.

A metaphorical "Royal Road" in famous quotations

King Ptolemy's request for an easier way of learning mathematics that "there is no Royal Road to geometry", according to Proclus.[8] The same sentence is also attributed to Menaechmus replying to Alexander the Great.[9]

Charles Sanders Peirce, in his How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878), says, "There is no royal road to logic, and really valuable ideas can only be had at the price of close attention."

Sigmund Freud famously described dreams as the "royal road to the unconscious" ("Via regia zur Kenntnis des Unbewußten").

Karl Marx wrote in the 1872 Preface to the French Edition of Das Kapital (Volume 1), "There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits."

The Royal Road to Romance (1925) is the first book by Richard Halliburton, covering his world travels as a young man from Andorra to Angkor.

See also

Notes

  1. ISBN 90-6258-408-X
    .
  2. ISBN 0-86007-707-1
    .
  3. ISBN 978-1610693912
    .
  4. S2CID 162371707 suggested that Herodotus was partly in error in his tracing the route through Anatolia by making it cross the Halys and showed that though his overall his distances in parasangs
    are approximately correct, his distances over the sections he describes bear no relation to geographical facts.
  5. JSTOR 985675
    .
  6. S2CID 192962099
    p. 266 "The Royal Road"; and 61 (1957:319 and illus.).
  7. ^ Starr, S. F. (1963). "The Persian Royal Road in Turkey". Yearbook of the American Philosophical Society 1962. Philadelphia. pp. 629–632.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  8. ^ Proclus, p. 57
  9. ^ "Menaechmus - Biography".

References

External links

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