Delivering a message from one person to another has been one of mankind’s greatest challenges for more than 4,000 years. Simply covering the distance from one place to another often is a daunting task; assuring a message arrives intact can be even more difficult.

Meeting those demands frequently requires cunning, courage and creativity--mental properties supplied by the men and women who move the mails, the letter carriers past and present who brave the elements, the animals, the vandals--and even the Visigoths--to make sure the mail goes through.

As we step into a new millennium, The Postal Record invites you along on a quick history of mail--nearly 5,000 years of adventures in communications. Starting out with the decidedly low-tech hard copy of ancient Mesopotamia, we’ll step all the way up to today’s direct- mail copy, beamed by satellite around the globe for overnight delivery.

In this first of two installments, we’ll review in capsule form the earliest days of mail and organized communications networks, starting from around 3000 B.C., when the Egyptians and Chinese (separately and half a world apart) created the first written languages. This month we’ll move right up to the tumultuous period just before the founding of the United States.

As you glance through this history, remember that in the beginning, mail systems were created by the powerful to keep in touch with the military leaders and administrators of conquered territories. Whether pharaoh, Roman emperor, Frankish crusader, or Germanic princeling, the object was timely military or diplomatic intelligence. Over the ages, the commercial benefits of secure, regular communication became increasingly important, creating an even greater, parallel demand among society’s most powerful forces for a reliable post. Also growing with the reliability and consistency of the post was a new sense of common interest that was the foundation for the building of nation-states--the mail was glue for early modern societies.

Finally, when we come near to our American revolution, “regular” people begin to use the post for day-to-day business transactions, the exchange of ideas and personal news and greetings--the very things, it turns out, that NALC members deliver every day. The mail proved crucial to binding the new nation together and still serves that purpose today at the dawn of the new millennium.

2000 B.C.
Assyrian merchants send clay tablets incised with cuneiform characters between towns using foot couriers. The tablets, representing orders, credits and bills for goods, are “signed” with cylinder seals and sometimes baked inside clay envelopes for security. Couriers may transport a half-dozen or more tablets, described as being the size of pillows (small ones, we hope!).

1700 B.C.
Egyptians, whose hieroglyphics are the most ancient writing system, establish an overland delivery system using horses to cover an expanding empire that stretches into modern day Iran. Ships also carry dispatches along the fertile banks of the Nile. Beginning about 2800 B.C., papyrus reeds were used to create a flexible writing material for the pharaoh’s court.

1027 B.C.
China’s Chou dynasty, whose later leaders built the first sections of the Great Wall, establishes the imperial post as a way to help consolidate its military power and bureaucratic control (it holds sway for 800 years). When couriers on horseback were not fast enough, homing pigeons were called into service. Successive imperial families improved the system and Marco Polo reported that in 1300 A.D. more than 300,000 horses were based at 10,000 stations for the Great Khan’s mail service.

490 B.C.
In the best known special delivery in European history, the Greek messenger Pheidippides runs from the Plain of Marathon to Athens, just over 26 miles, carrying the news that the Greeks defeated invading Persians, despite being outnumbered two to one. After gasping out the message--Greek couriers were chosen both for speed and their ability to memorize messages-- Pheidippides collapsed (by some accounts he died). The distance is the standard for the race we now call a marathon. About 50 years later, the Greek historian Herodotus, describing the Persian system of delivering military intelligence by horseback over long distance, writes, “Not snow, no, nor rain, nor heat, nor night keeps them from accomplishing their appointed courses with all speed.” Another 2,500 years passes before the quote is chiseled on the front of the New York City Main Post Office as “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

125 A.D.
Roman emperor Hadrian makes maintenance of the system of postal roads a priority to hold his far-flung empire together with timely dispatch and receipt of written military orders and intelligence; unfortunately for his successors, the roads also smoothed the way for marauding barbarians. In imperial Rome, prominent citizens traveled around the capital with their writing materials and a courier/servant readily at hand to deliver their missives. Julius Caesar is said to have tried to defend himself from his assassins in with his “pen”--a metal stylus used for marking the reusable waxed surface of a clay tablet. The Romans also sent messages on papyrus and later used parchments made from animal skins.

400 A.D.
Both imperial and commercial correspondence is moving across the Mediterranean by ship as well as around it afoot and on horseback at the close of the 4th century, but mail service disintegrates after the collapse of the Roman Empire. When the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 A.D., they stamped out regular mail in Europe for about 900 years.

1300 A.D.
While castle lords and leaders of religious orders rely on traveling merchants, soldiers and their own armed monks as couriers, getting messages across the crazy quilt of loosely organized principalities in the forests of central Europe at the end of the Dark Ages is both difficult and dangerous. In Italy, the commercial success of Venice gives birth not only to the Renaissance but also to a collection of courier services, such as the Company of Venetian Couriers, to handle mails arriving and departing by ship and messages between merchants and bankers in Venice and inland cities. By 1457, a couriers’ schedule reports that, depending on weather, a letter from Venice to Rome will take 7 to 11 days--on a par with service in Rome’s heyday.

1402 A.D.
China’s Ming dynasty emperor Yung Lo opens the imperial postal service to the delivery of private letters, and also allows creation of private postal companies to operate alongside the imperial post, using the same routes and stopping places. The private firms, available to all users, connect major cities and offer comparatively low rates--the rough equivalent of what is charged today for Priority Mail. Express delivery cost more and was indicated by burning one corner of the envelope so a feather can be slipped in until just the tip protruded. (The Chinese invented papermaking about 100 A.D., but it took more than 1,000 years for the technique to reach Western Europe, through the Moors occupying Spain. Its use was not widespread until movable- type printing was invented in the 15th century.)

1464 A.D.
King Louis XI of France creates the Royal Post, whose regular messengers are announced with golden horns. The mission of these postmen was considered so important that to delay the mail meant extreme punishment, even death--for the courier! About the same time, the envelopes of royal letters in England also carried dire warnings for added security, including drawings of a skull and cross-bones next to the address and admonitions for speedy delivery: “Haste, Post Haste, For Thy Lyfe, Post Haste.”

1489 A.D.
Frederick III appoints Johann von Taxis, of the Venetian Thurn and Taxis family, as the first Imperial Postmaster of the Holy Roman Empire. The family emblem is the badger and its couriers each wore a distinctive swatch of badger fur as a symbol of office and protection--a possible foreshadowing, since the NALC is founded 400 years later in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Badger State. When the empire can’t keep up promised payments, the Thurn and Taxis system for handling commercial and diplomatic dispatches is opened to the general public and it expands through the 16th century to cover all of Europe, delivering messages from Brussels to Paris in 36 hours, Brussels to Naples in 14 days. By the end of the 18th century, more than 20,000 men are in the employ of the Thurn and Taxis. The family controlled system serves as the backbone for European continental mail well into the 19th century.

1635 A.D.
The British government begins collecting postal revenues on domestic mail--it already had claimed the right to deliver, read and censor all international mail. The charge was 2 pence for a single-sheet letter carried up to 80 miles, 4 pence from 80 to 140 miles, and 6 pence for more than 140 miles. Rates doubled for two sheets. Delivery was made by private contractors under annual arrangements with the crown, who collect the fees in cash and pay it over to government agents--postage stamps aren’t used for another two centuries. Competing private carriage of mail is “discouraged” by armed force and the government turned a profit on mail service--a result political leaders came to expect.

1692 A.D.
Great Britain’s King William III grants the first “patent” for mail delivery in his American colonies. The patent holder--a nobleman who never left England--allows colonial governments to make proposals to tap into his exclusive right to provide service and New York is the first to act, creating a General Letter Office and establishing a 100 pound fine for anyone setting up a competing letter service. A single-sheet letter to Boston is to be charged 9 pence. Pennsylvania soon follows suit and the first inter-colonial service begins May 1, 1693 from Portsmouth, New Hampshire to Philadelphia. Unlike the rapid system of relay riders common in Europe, individual riders typically made the long journeys across the colonial wilderness on horseback, often following ancient trails. The paths eventually become roads and some are still in use today as U.S. highways and Interstate routes.

1707 A.D.
Dissatisfied with the inefficient, patchwork system that evolves, the Crown buys out the colonial patent postal system and the mails in America become a royal operation. Postage rates--set by Parliament in London--are high and widely seen as little more than another form of taxation. In 1737, Benjamin Franklin, a successful printer and publisher, becomes postmaster of Philadelphia, and in 1753 King George III names Franklin and William Hunter as Deputy Postmasters General for America. In the summer of that year, Franklin conducts an inspection tour of post roads and offices in the northern colonies and made further research the next year. He and Hunter added new riders to established routes, cut delivery times, and by the time he left office there were post roads from Maine to Florida. Franklin also reformed the treatment of newspapers by post, requiring postmasters (who often were newspaper publishers like himself) to reimburse post-riders for out- of-town newspapers on an even-handed, standardized fee schedule. The system helped give the name “Post” to numerous newspapers and more importantly encouraged the free flow of information. It was a crucial step on the road toward independence for America.

1774 A.D.
Franklin is dismissed as Deputy Postmaster General amid revolutionary foment. After Royal Mail officials bar his newspaper from the mails, William Goddard of Baltimore hires riders to deliver his papers to New York via Philadelphia, laying down the first lines of a rebel mail system that grows more successful as revolutionaries drive more and more royal couriers from the highways of the colonies. On July 26, 1775, the Continental Congress votes to appoint a Postmaster General for the United Colonies and immediately names Franklin, who assumes control of postal operations--creating the first postal service of the soon-to-be-declared United States of America.