I want to introduce you to one of my favourite animals of all time, the mule. Mules are hybrids: the mother is a horse, the father is a donkey. And therefore they are infertile, no mule can ever have a young. Every mule is an end to itself. Having said that, otherwise there are only positives. Mules are very hardy; they don't need as much water or food as a horse would. They are less stubborn than a donkey. They are also much bigger than a donkey. And in short, they are the ideal riding animal if you want to cover long distances in predominantly arid climates. And that's precisely what we have in the Assyrian empire. Mules are expensive. They are expensive today and they were very expensive in the past. A mule would cost several times the price of a human. They were, therefore, way beyond the reach of most consumers. But the Assyrian state used them exclusively for their telecommunications strategy. In this image, which obviously is not an Assyrian image, we see someone riding atop of a mule and leading a second mule next to the first. And that's how it would've worked also in ancient Assyria. You would always work with pairs of mules, so in case the first mule became incapacitated, was hurt, you would have a replacement. So while one mule is already expensive, two mules are even more expensive. Why is all of this important? It's important because in the 9th century BC, the Assyrian Empire created a completely new strategy of how to make this big state cohere, how to communicate effectively and efficiently between the centre and the various provinces. And the mule played a key role there because the mule was the animal that facilitated transport. So let's have a look at the map so that we can envisage this. Here, over there is Kalhu the capital city. And one capital of a provincial structure is Que situated pretty much where the modern Turkish city of Adana is located. So we have a distance basically from modern day Adana to modern day Mosul roughly, and that's 700 kilometres. So that's a vast distance. In addition to that, we have the physical obstacles to consider. We have several rivers, as you can see. We have mountain ranges, and we have a sizable steppe region. And you can see how the mule is a good choice to cover this terrain. The mule wouldn't be too badly affected in the steppe because it doesn't need as much water. The mule could easily handle traversing the mountain ranges because it's sure-footed. And the mule is also able to traverse streams, rivers- it's not shy of the water. So you could basically make it across these smaller rivers. Nevertheless, we still have the Euphrates and the Tigris to consider. And a mule would not swim across these big rivers. A mule would have to be transported, like everyone and everything else, with a ferry across these rivers. So not only do we have 700 kilometers in distance in this instance, we also have very different environments, we have some serious obstacles, and for many of these obstacles, the mule is a very, very good choice. Good, so if we imagine that our one mule which is about, actually our pair of mules and their handler would travel the entire distance of 700 kilometres. That would still take quite a lot of time. Even if the mule is well rested and is well fed, it still would have to take breaks. And with it, of course, the rider. Now, if we imagine that the rider makes stops, changes the riding animals, and always starts again with a new set of animals, we'd speed things up considerably. And we would use a relay system. But if we imagine that we also exchanged the rider, then we would be much faster. Because then we basically don't have anyone involved who needs to eat and drink and sleep before they can continue. So that's what the Assyrians did, they used a relay system and at regular intervals the animals were exchanged and also the messenger was exchanged. The only thing that was transported across the entire distance was the letter. Now we've come across Assyrian letters before. We know already that they must be inscribed in cuneiform on a clay tablet, and that they were encased in an envelope. The envelope would identify the person sending the letter, and the person receiving the letter. And it would be sealed with a seal that identified whoever sent the letter. Okay, so this is what was transported. And to us, it's not a big deal to imagine that multiple hands would have that letter while the letter travelled across our distance. But this was actually a revolutionary new development. Up to that point, no one had ever considered doing things like that. Because the trust that the sender had to put into the one person who he gave the letter to was so big that, of course, this one person who had been entrusted with the letter was expected to cross the entire distance and deliver the letter into the hands of whoever was meant to receive it, and only that person. So in that sense, the idea of using a relay system that made use of a whole group of people who all would only transport this letter for a certain stretch of the journey was a totally different thing- a revolutionary thing that placed a very different understanding into the meaning of the relationship between the letter writer, the messenger, and the recipient. This is what happened in the 9th century. A relay system was created that allowed for this. We are completely familiar with this. When you receive a letter, you don't even think about all the many people who handled that letter. You simply trust that no one interfered with the letter ever since it's been put into a mailbox. And that belief that the secret of the letter was a given, that the people involved in transporting the letter would not tamper with the letter. That belief was an invention of the 9th century, this trust. Okay, so we have a system that depends on a relay system. We have great number of messengers. We have them using very sturdy, very expensive, very sure footed animals, pairs of them, to ride and they transport these letters. And these letters in themselves have an in-built security mechanism. On the one hand, they are, of course, encased in the envelope. And on the other hand, they are inscribed in cuneiform. Now, you might remember that in the Assyrian Empire, several writing systems were being used. And in addition to cuneiform, Aramaic. The Aramaic alphabet is the second important one. The alphabetic script is much easier to learn and to write. And it was explicitly excluded from the state correspondence. The king wanted his officials and himself to use this system with cuneiform. We have to be aware of the fact that the more complex writing system of cuneiform guaranteed that fewer people would have been in a position to read such a letter, if they ever got it into their hands. So it's quite likely that also the use of cuneiform for letters, in a system that otherwise was quite flexible with which script was being used, was part of the safety mechanisms put into place in order to guarantee that this trust wasn't abused, the trust and the sanctity of the letter. Okay, so you will remember, I hope, that the seals that were being used to seal envelopes were highly private, intimate objects that also served as a personal identifier of the person who used them. Now, this letter was written by a private individual and was therefore sealed with that person's seal. Now the letters that were transported by our mule express would not have been sealed with private seals. In fact, they had to be sealed with this seal, and only this seal. Otherwise, they would not have been transported at all along this relay route system. Now, this is an ancient impression of a stamp seal that was actually part of a finger ring. And the dimensions are about two centimetres in diameter. So you can all imagine a finger ring with a stone set into it that corresponds to the seal that made such an impression. And if you look at the motif, it shows the Assyrian king fighting a lion. And in other contexts we've already encountered, the king as a killer of lions, as part of a big ritual that guaranteed the balance of the world order. So in this icon, the king chooses to show himself as the slayer of a lion. And thereby showed himself as the master of all, who kept checks and boundaries on evil symbolised by the lion. This image was created in the 9th century at the same time as the relay system that we've been discussing. And it was only the holders of this seal who were entitled to make use of the relay system for the state mail. Every official of a certain rank, so we're talking about provincial governors and the like, was given, at the moment of their appointment, a copy of the ring bearing that seal by the king himself. And with that ring, which was golden, with that golden ring, the official was recognisable by all as someone who had been entrusted with governing power by the Assyrian king. And with this seal, every letter was stamped that this official sent either to the king or to his fellow officials. And by doing that, that letter qualified for use of the state relay system. If we go back to our mules, we've already emphasised that they were an expensive choice of animal. We have emphasised that two mules were used. And of course, they were used only at the particular stretch of the distance. At the end of this distance would have been post stations. Now here, I have an image showing a caravanserai, a trade post station in Kyrgyzstan, quite close to the border with China. I've chosen this image because the post station is situated in a very, very remote location. And it's positioned there in order to provide protection and a chance to rest for whoever was travelling on that road. Assyrians' post stations had a similar function. They were the place the mules were being exchanged and where the rider was being exchanged. Some of them were situated in cities. Others were, like this one, situated in quite remote corners of the Assyrian Empire because the relay system covered the entire empire and grew as the empire grew. The post stations were positioned in a distance of 35 to 40 kilometres from each other. We know that from Assyrian texts. No single post station has ever been excavated, so we mustn't necessarily assume that it looks anything like that. In fact, it's almost excluded that that would have been the case because this post station in Kyrgyzstan was open to commercial travellers. And that's definitely not the case for the Assyrian post station. The Assyrian post station would have only been used for the purposes of the state mail. The people who maintained these post stations, and their riders and our mules, were all part of the military. And the post stations in Assyria were reserved for a very, very select group of people: the people that had a copy of this seal, and only that seal. And because of the small group of people, we're still talking about something like a 150 participants however, the expense that was put into this system is all the higher, because it benefited so very few people. And it highlights the fact that the ability to communicate swiftly from all corners of the empire with the king was seen as a key strategy in making the empire cohere, a key strategy in making sure that the realms stayed intact. And if we think about our distance of 700 kilometres, then you might ask, how long did it then take for a letter to travel along this distance of 700 kilometres? That's a very, very hard question to answer. As I said, every 35 to 40 kilometres the letter would have been passed onto a new rider and a new pair of mules. We can probably assume that the relay, the handing over of the letter from one team to the next, was something that happened very quickly. But we do not know, for example, whether they would travel through the night. So that's entirely possible, and mules would be able to do that if they know the stretch well. But that's one of the things that we do not know. However we see that, it is clear that this distance of 700 kilometres would definitely have been covered in five days or less. The bottlenecks would've been the rivers, the big rivers, Euphrates and Tigris. Five days or less between Adana and Mosul is fast, it's very fast. And we have to be aware of the fact that only when telegraphy was invented in the 19th century, coinciding also with the rise of the train system, that that was the time, and for the first moment in time, the speed of the Assyrian relay system was topped. Until then, it represented the best that was technologically possible. And the key bit of information is that in the 9th century BC, during the time of the early Assyrian Empire, notions of trust changed in a way that allowed several messengers, one after the other, access to this highly confidential piece of information. We've already said that the members of this postal system were part of the military. And that in turn helps to explain why it was possible to place this trust in all these people. They were sworn to the state. They were servants of the state, anyway. And we've already emphasised in other occasions that the Assyrian king had to be willing to delegate power, also in this regard.
