The famous postal motto on a New York post office is Persian
Carved across the James Farley Post Office in New York is a line about couriers undeterred by snow, rain, heat or gloom of night. It comes from Herodotus, who was describing Persian riders swapping horses at relay stations a day's journey apart. The American mail borrowed its slogan from an empire of the fifth century BCE.
Carrying written orders is almost as old as writing. Egyptian pharaohs sent couriers with decrees across their realm around 2400 BCE, and the oldest surviving piece of mail is an Egyptian item from 255 BCE. The first convincing postal system, though, belonged to the Achaemenid Persians. Xenophon credited Cyrus the Great, while other writers name Darius, who rebuilt the Royal Road so riders could race from Susa to Sardis. The network doubled as a spy service, and Rome later copied it as the cursus publicus under Augustus.
Chinese dynasties built some of the largest networks. The Han kept relay stations about every 15 kilometres, and the Tang ran 1,639 posthouses staffed by roughly 20,000 people under the Ministry of War, with private letters banned. Genghis Khan set up the Mongol relay system known as Örtöö, and by the end of Kublai Khan's reign China alone had over 1,400 stations. Those stations kept some 50,000 horses and 6,000 boats, along with over 200 dogs and 1,150 sheep. Marco Polo praised its speed.
Other routes ran on faith and feathers. Egyptians were tying messages to homing pigeons by 3000 BCE. The Cistercian monks linked more than 6,000 abbeys, monasteries and churches with their own couriers, though the Knights Templar reportedly organized theirs even better. In Japan, the modern post created the world's largest postal savings system, which helped fund the country's rapid industrialization in the late 19th century.
The word itself began as luggage. Middle English male meant a travelling bag, and by 1654 it described a sack of letters before shifting to the letters themselves. Post traces to the Latin verb for laying something down, which is why Britain's Royal Mail delivers the post. Today the Universal Postal Union, founded in 1874 and now a United Nations agency, sets the rules for mail crossing borders among its 192 members.
Source: Mail
