Topic: infrastructure (2)

• ConceptThe Royal Road

  The great overland route and courier relay that bound the Achaemenid empire together: the road of stations and inns Herodotus walked in his mind from Sardis to Susa, and the mounted post along it that the Greeks called the angareion, carrying the King's word across a world in a matter of days. It…

• PlaceThe Xerxes Canal

  The Xerxes Canal was a navigable channel cut through the neck of the Athos peninsula in northern Greece on the orders of Xerxes I, during the regional preparations made over roughly the three years before his invasion of Greece in 480 BCE (see the invasion of Greece). Herodotus describes conscript…