Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

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.]