King Cyrus the Great, builder of the Persian Empire, is considered to be the founder of the postal relay system which employed messengers on horseback by day and night. The king’s stables were set up at intervals to the distance a horse could travel in a day without becoming exhausted. Each stable had grooms to look after its horses. An intelligent man was appointed to each station who would deliver to one courier the letters brought by another. This was called “post-riding”. Xenophon wrote of the mighty ruler’s mail service, “A letter traveled faster than a crane could fly.” The Greek historian Herodotus praised the Persian postal system, “Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
The clay cylinder discovered in Babylon in the fifth century records the victory King Cyrus over Babylon in 539 BCE. It is a declaration concerning the human rights in occupied cities. In G.S. Wegener’s book ‘6000 years of the Bible’, he describes the victory of King Cyrus, “The Persian king Cyrus defeated the Babylonians and in doing so put an end both to the rule of Babylon and the captivity of the Jews. Their longing for homes and for the holy city of Jerusalem, their weeping ‘by the waters of Babylon’, were over. Two years later they returned to their own country… The Persians are perhaps the only example in history of a people who called themselves ‘liberators’ are really being liberators and not oppressors.”
Centuries later, Julius Caesar adopted the Persian courier system of using mounted messengers, later developed by Emperor Augustus.
the post-riding facility is amazing!