Persian Royal Road and relay post
Camino Real persa y red de postas (angarium)
- Date
- c. 500 BCE · confidence medium
- Place
- Susa, Khuzestan, Iran
- Credited to
- Darius I (Achaemenids)
- People
- 👤 Darío I550 BCE–486 BCE
- Field
- Communication
What it is
Roughly 2,700 km road between Susa and Sardis with 111 relay stations, where mounted couriers passed on messages and covered in about seven days what took three months on foot. Herodotus described it, and the Persepolis tablets record its rations.
Part of the route reuses Assyrian roads; the relay system (angarium) is documented in the Persepolis fortification tablets.
What it led to
- centralised government of the first world empire
- model for the Roman cursus publicus and the Islamic barid
- long-distance trade across Anatolia and Mesopotamia