Editing Mail (section)

=== Persia (Iran) ===
{{main|Royal Road|Chapar-Khaneh|Angarium}}
The first credible claim for the development of a real postal system comes from [[Ancient Persia]]. The best-documented claim ([[Xenophon]]) attributes the invention to the Persian king [[Cyrus the Great]] (550 BCE), who mandated that every province in his kingdom would organize reception and delivery of post to each of its citizens. Other writers credit his successor [[Darius I of Persia]] (521 BCE). Other sources claim much earlier dates for an Assyrian postal system, with credit given to [[Hammurabi]] (1700 BCE) and [[Sargon II of Assyria|Sargon II]] (722 BCE). Mail may not have been the primary mission of this postal service, however. The role of the system as an intelligence gathering apparatus is well documented, and the service was (later) called ''angariae'', a term that in time came to indicate a tax system. The [[Old Testament]] ([[Esther]], VIII) makes mention of this system: [[Xerxes I|Ahasuerus]], king of [[Persians|Persian]], used couriers for communicating his decisions.

The [[Achaemenid Empire|Persian]] system worked using stations (called [[Chapar Khaneh|Chapar-Khaneh]]), whence the message carrier (called [[Chapar Khaneh|Chapar]]) would ride to the next post, whereupon he would swap his horse with a fresh one for maximum performance and delivery speed. [[Herodotus]] described the system in this way: "It is said that as many days as there are in the whole journey, so many are the men and horses that stand along the road, each horse and man at the interval of a day's journey; and these are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed".<ref>Herodotus, Herodotus, trans. A.D. Godley, vol. 4, book 8, verse 98, pp. 96–97 (1924).</ref> The verse prominently features on New York's [[James Farley Post Office]], although it uses the translation "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds".