Book: Travel in the Ancient World

[redbird]

Travel in the Ancient World, by Lionel Casson, is just what it says: an overview of medium- to long-distance travel in the ancient world, meaning mostly the area relatively near the Mediterranean, from pre-history through about the sixth century CE. cattitude picked this one up on a whim, and we've both found it delightful.

Casson says he wrote this because there was nothing else that even tried to cover the whole topic; the work that came closest was decades old (meaning that a fair amount of recent archeological evidence hadn't been used), more limited, and in German. What he covers includes, obviously, how people got where they were going—road-building and maintenance; carts, riding animals and beasts of burden, litters, and simple walking; ships, life on shipboard, and common routes by sea—but there's a lot more here than that. We learned about the varying arrangements for finding a place to stay in the destination city, including generations-long arrangements like "your family can stay with ours, and vice versa" and "we'll give a room to anyone from this town who comes to our city," as well as sleeping in temple porches and the eventual development of inns.

A thorough discussion of travel includes a discussion of what people did at the destination, which overlaps with the questions of why they were going. It turns out that, for the most part, ancient Greeks, Romans, Assyrians, Indians, and so on traveled for the same reasons people do today, including business (loosely divisible into trade and government business); tourism in various forms; and religious pilgrimages. The tourist visit to see ancient Egyptian monuments is itself ancient: 35 centuries ago, Egyptian guides were showing foreigners the pyramids and the Great Sphinx, which were already ancient at the time.

A chunk of what I expect to remember is the incidentals: that the Appian Way is named for the Roman official who ordered it built; that the first known archeological museum was opened by Nebuchadnezzar II; that Monty Python didn't invent the community of hundreds of hermits in the desert; that there are Egyptian monuments where having one's name carved on the wall, graffiti-style, appears to have been a privilege reserved to high officials and their families; that the ancient Greeks invented not only theatre, but the touring company.

[The edition we have is from 1994, but appears to be basically a reprint of the 1974 original: Johns Hopkins University Press, 0-8018-4808-3.]

Comments

[cheshyre]

For a lighter-weight account of similar material, a recent book called Route 66 A.D.: on the trail of ancient Roman tourists decribes a modern man's attempt at following the classical travel routes, flipping back and forth between the historical lessons and how things compare today.

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

that sounds fascinating, read an excerpt at amazon and it seems eminently readable too *adds to reading list* thankyou! :)

[dhole.livejournal.com]

Not that you've expressed any need for reassurance on this point, but Casson is an absolute giant in the field of nautical history and archaeology. Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World, another book of his, is one of the standard texts, and has been for some time.

[redbird]

I hadn't expressed need for reassurance, but neither would I have guessed it from reading this book, which has some nautical history but little if any nautical archeology. He does care about things like the design of coracles used on the Tigris and Euphrates, but what we're told is "and they're still using the same basic design," rather than "we know this from one dug up at X in 1943," the way he notes fortuitous finds of letters to travelers in Egypt, and from Egyptian travelers to their families at home (papyrus left lying around in the desert lasts surprisingly well) and that we have far less information about the Chinese than the Western roads, for reasons including that they built their bridges of wood rather than stone, and it doesn't last as well.

(Deleted an earlier version of this because I omitted key words.)

[coth.livejournal.com]

I read this a long time ago, and remember it fondly. The main thing I think I retain from reading it is the understanding of travel to work tolerances - that population distribution plotted in relation to travel time remains remarkably consistent, regardless of the travel technology in use. Whether people travel on foot, by cart, or car and train, most people live within half-an-hour of their work, and the percentages of the population willing to travel for longer to work or work away from home remains fairly constant across many societies. That and that road widths even today are based on the standard widths of chariot axles.

I think it is a book that could fairly be said to be educational in the widest sense, drawing on history, literature, economics and other disciplines to tell us a lot about why the world works the way it does.

[redbird]

That's an idea I've seen elsewhere, but it's not in Casson: he's talking about travel well beyond that distance, not the person commuting daily, or even going into the city every week and home on weekends, but the trader going from Italy to Asia Minor, or the bureaucrat or ambassador sent from Sumeria to Egypt.

Of course, the same roads that can be used to take people a long distance will take them two miles, but that's not really Casson's subject.

ancient world commute times

[wavemage.livejournal.com]

Do you have a source for that info? I'd really like to find it. I think it must be right, that 30 to 60 minutes commute to work is probably consistent throughout history (over an hour becomes really grueling). I'd like to find some hard data, if indeed any exists. Curious if it applies to Mayan civilization, as well as European, African, etc etc