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Do you mean someone of a high enough rank could have official communications and military dispatches delivered, or do you mean any person could have any letter
by strken 3y ago
Do you mean someone of a high enough rank could have official communications and military dispatches delivered, or do you mean any person could have any letter delivered to any home? I think tialaramex was writing more about universal civilian letter delivery, and particularly about universal (well, global or near-global) addressing, rather than letter delivery between officials within an empire.
- Beldin 3y agoThere would only be a need for that with ubiquitous literacy. The Roman system may well have been close enough to universally accessible and offer delivery throughout their territory for Roman citizens who were literate.
- vidarh 3y agoI don't think it realistically did - it included a system of authorisation that implied a demand that was intentionally denied, however there are multiple other old postal systems which definitely did (e.g. the Imperial Mail of the Holy Roman Empire [1] being one of the significant ones, but that itself built on older systems). A more defensible claim would be the strictly limited claim that the idea of attempting to create a global postal system with global addressability is a new idea. But even long before the UPU, a lot of countries had treaties to allow for forwarding of post, so I think it's unlikely that this idea was new as well, just previously impractical. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiserliche_Reichspost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiserliche_Reichspost
- jjk166 3y agoIf something has been invented, the idea "the exact same thing but cheaper" has definitely already entered peoples' minds. They may not know a good method to do it, but they can imagine a world in which it exists.