Post
age
March 24, 2006
In
the last of her two reports, Victoria Neumark describes how
letter-writing and postal services developed from ancient
Mesopotamia to the present
I sent a letter to my love
And on the way I dropped it,
Someone must have picked it up
And put it in their pocket
So runs the still-popular circle game. But has email made
the song - and hence the game - redundant? Will millennia
of written communication dissolve this century into the
ether of electronic pulses? With the Royal Mail currently
handling 80 million items a day, that doesn't seem too
likely. Frank Kermode, in his introduction to The Oxford
Book of Letters, estimates that most of us write at least
half a dozen letters every week, so that in 50 or 60 years
of normal writing life, many people must despatch about
18,000 letters. But that book was compiled in 1995. What is
the figure in 2006? Would it include emails, texts, faxes?
An internet story circulates about the day the first
Hotmail message was sent to India, with "Get your free
email account at hotmail.com" at the bottom of it. Next
morning the traffic statistics had quintupled overnight, on
the strength of that one email. People are hungry,
desperate even, to communicate. Mail is crucial: but are
letters?
Back in the mists of time, letter-writing was born, shortly
after the invention of writing. The physical expression of
mail took different forms according to the culture in which
it arose.
Ancient postal services
In Egypt, where the afterlife dominated the everyday more
than anywhere else in history, some of the first "letters"
were written on bowls and scraps of papyrus inscribed to
dead relatives, from the late Old Kingdom (about
2686-2181bc) to the late New Kingdom (about 1550-1069bc).
Some are currently in the Petrie Museum of Archaeology at
University College London.
These letters are not just saying "Hi". They treat the dead
as powerful and possibly malignant beings. They urge
compassion and restraint upon the departed and remind
recently deceased members of the family - spouses, parents,
siblings -to intervene in the afterlife, even at the court
of the underworld, to solve difficulties over health or
property. One can only speculate on the ultimate delivery.
In Mesopotamia, where trade was the lifeblood of the
emerging state, letters began as clay tokens rattling
inside a clay box sent between Sumerian merchants around
4000bc. The tokens stood for trade accounts. To indicate
what was inside the boxes, merchants impressed cuneiform
symbols on the outside. Soon enough, they realised that the
symbols obviated any need for the tokens and the
information was sent on the "envelope" tablets alone. To
keep everyone in the loop, they developed schools for an
educated elite and for the many scribes who were needed for
all the record-keeping and letter-writing needed by the
fast-growing civilisation.
The postal service continued to grow. Although some ancient
historians credit Assyrians Sargon II (2334-2279bc) the
great conqueror, or Hammurabi (1795-1750bc) the great
law-giver, with inventing the first postal service, the
Greek writer Xenophon attributes the invention of a
universal postal service to the much later Persian Empire,
with Cyrus the Great (550bc) and his barids, who were
entitled to call on local authorities for refreshments for
themselves and their horses. This was not exactly a mail
service that Postman Pat would recognise, however. The
couriers were well attested as intelligence and even
revenue-gatherers for the rulers. Surveillance went hand in
hand with information. The Bible (Book of Esther, VIII)
mentions this courier system: Ahasuerus, King of Medes,
sent out messengers to issue his decrees - servants with
beasts of burden rather than jolly red vans, and it took
weeks rather than hours, but the post got through.
It was not until the Greeks that European letters escaped
the bounds of scribal control. In about 325bc, the Greeks
developed fluent handwriting with upper and lower-case
characters, as opposed to the formal scribing of upper-case
symbols (attributed to Cadmus, founder of the city of
Thebes).
They first used a writing stylus, made of metal, bone or
ivory, to place marks on wax-coated tablets which were made
in hinged pairs and closed to protect the scribe's notes,
but, soon enough, personal messages were written in ink
made from ground minerals or macerated plant fibres, on to
papyrus or parchment.
Paper did not arrive the West till the Middle Ages. It was
probably a Chinese invention (see box below). Greek
handwriting was transplanted during the 1st century bc into
the Roman Empire. Papyrus (made from pulped reeds) or
parchment (sheep's skin) and ink were not cheap, but they
were not prohibitively expensive. Private couriers were
still sent on foot or on horseback, but at the time of
Augustus Caesar (62bc to ad14), the Romans organised a
cursus publicus, or state post, largely for civil servants
and military orders for governing the empire, using light
carriages called rhed with fast horses. This offered a
first-class service, while another, slower, service was
equipped with two-wheel carts (birol) pulled by oxen.
Later, private citizens were offered a paid-for service.
Among the Roman aristocracy, letter-writing became the
rage, with outpourings of love, gossip, information and
political propaganda mingling with commercial transactions
on a hitherto unknown scale. The very word "post" comes
from posata or pausata, the places where messengers rested
and routes crossed.
The modern mail service
The word mail supposedly derives from the Teutonic name for
the bag used by messengers. The Teutons came up with their
own system, memorialised in the symbol still used in
Germany today: a black post-horn symbol on a yellow
background (see left). For 500 years, a well-connected
family called the Princes of Thurn und Taxis (Tassis in
Italian), ran the Vatican's private postal service. On
receiving a letter from the Pope, delivered speedily and
personally by Roger of Tassis, the Holy Roman Emperor
Frederick III (1444-1493) realised the potential of a more
formal system than that of the merchants' private couriers.
The empire covered most of Europe, with terrible roads,
impassable swamps and high mountains, but the Thurn und
Taxis messengers used a relay system of horses to get their
messages over mountains and across rivers.
Prince Franz von Thurn und Taxis was appointed postmaster
by Emperor Maximilian I. In 1501, he obtained the right to
carry government as well as private mail throughout the
empire, and expanded this to a network of postal routes in
Spain, Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, and the Low
Countries from 1512 to 1867. At its height, the system
employed about 20,000 messengers to deliver mail and
newspapers.
Letters became a staple of art, as well as an art in
themselves, from the fictional note dropped on purpose in
Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, for instance, to the many
paintings created by the Dutch artist Jan Vermeer
(1632-1675) of women receiving, reading and writing
letters. "Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window", "Lady
Writing a Letter With Her Maid", "The Love Letter", "Woman
Writing a Letter" are just a few of the moments of still
concentration that Vermeer immortalised in his domestic
interiors pierced by shafts of light. Such moments could
not have been created without widespread literacy and a
postal service, just as the tea and coffee that the women
drank and the silks and muslins that they wore, could not
have been traded without international correspondence.
However, such a supranational network could not withstand
Napoleon's conquests and the technological challenges of
the 18th and 19th centuries with the invention of steam
navigation and the railway.
An Austrian postmaster, Johann Georg Khumer of Friesach,
introduced the first modern postmark in 1787, although it
was 80 years before this pioneering step became general
practice. Governments began to see that, if communications
were to keep pace with transport, formalities would have to
be standardised and reduced. They could not afford to leave
control of the mail to private enterprise. Pressure for
wider democracy, too, led to the decline of the Thurn und
Taxis system in the 1850s and so, nearly 500 years after it
was established, the family's postal network was sold. In
1867 it was nationalised by the newly emergent Prussian
monarchy.
In Great Britain in 1840, reformer Rowland Hill
(1795-1879), impelled by the injustice of the random level
of private postal levies, imposed the rate for letters in
the Post Office internal service as a penny; that
standardised fee was matched by the introduction of the
stamp, the famous Penny Black (see left). Before the
establishment of post offices and sub post offices later in
the 19th century, people collected and posted their letters
at receiving houses. These were often inns or posthouses
along main coach routes or, in towns, the coaching inns at
the end of the routes.
Handling the post was just one commercial activity
undertaken by the receiving house - similar in function to
modern sub post offices. The postmaster may also have
worked as a chemist, builder, bookseller or decorator, or
provided a general village shop.
Today, we take pillar boxes for granted, but in the late
1840s posting a letter could mean a long walk to the
nearest receiving house or post office. The novelist
Anthony Trollope was responsible for introducing them to
Britain. An employee of the Post Office, in 1851 he visited
the Channel Islands to experiment with improving services.
He trialled roadside posting boxes so successfully that
they were installed on the mainland in 1853, and the
familiar cylindrical red box was introduced in 1879.
In 1874, an international convention was signed at Bern
which set up the Universal Postal Union, facilitating the
exchange of mail between nations.
The treaty unified a confusing maze of postal services and
regulations across the world into a single postal territory
for the reciprocal exchange of letters (the union now
operates as a specialised agency of the United Nations).
In 1881, Henry Fawcett, UK Postmaster General, introduced
the postal order as an easy and safe method of transferring
money, intended for people who did not have bank accounts.
Dark doings over a postal order in 1908 formed the basis of
Terence Rattigan's play, The Winslow Boy (1946).
Volumes of mail escalated. In 1883, parcel post was
introduced and letter carriers renamed postmen. By 1901,
the UK Post Office handled 2.1 billion letters, with
several deliveries a day.
Writing technology went hand in hand with this increased
volume of post. As the first Remington typewriter
advertisements declared: "To save time is to lengthen
life." In 1874, Charles Sholes and Carlos Glidden made an
agreement with the Remington company to have their model,
the "Type-writer", with its QWERTY keyboard, manufactured
in quantity. They envisaged only commercial use for the
sewing-machine based instrument, but by the late 1890s
portable machines were being used at home, while smaller
versions produced for writing letters home from the
trenches during the First World War quickly caught on.
Similarly, popular use of the fountain pen, first patented
in the US in 1809, was established in the 1880s and really
took off with soldiers writing home during the First World
War. Sales of Parker pens in 1920 were one million and kept
leaping as technology improved. The invention of the
ballpoint pen, patented by Ladislaw Biro in 1938, made
writing even more convenient.
The world shrank. Aeroplanes and air-compression tubes (see
box) made communications faster and faster. The world's
first regular airmail service was a temporary one, run
between Hendon, north London and Windsor, as part of the
coronation celebrations for King George V on September 9,
1911. The first regular international airmail service
started in 1919, when the Royal Air Force delivered mail
between London and Paris.
In fact, letters became the victim of their own success. In
1968, the UK Post Office was the world's first modern
postal service to introduce a two-tier delivery system.
Royal Mail's solution to the vast quantity of mail was to
use first and second-class stamps, the more expensive first
class indicating next-day delivery. But this posed new
dilemmas: were you worth no more than a second-class stamp?
Even now, when
the invention of the telegraph (1837) and telephone (1875)
mean that we can talk to anyone, anywhere, Royal Mail
continues to deliver post regularly to more than 26 million
addresses. The mailbag competes with the mobile phone
(1975) and email (1971). But will there ever be anything as
thrilling as the first handwritten letter from a lover?
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