Chapter 1: A History of Information Highways and Byways

Ancient Networks
pp. 2-7

The concept of networking to communicate and share information is neither new nor limited to computers. The earliest incentive to develop networks was the need to bridge distances and communicate beyond the line of sight. The need for a network system was primarily a military one. A well-known example is that of the Romans, who built some of the earliest networks, with a road system that facilitated not only the rapid movement of troops but also the rapid exchange of information by messengers. In short, the words networks and information are nearly synonymous and emphasize the value of the timely acquisition of information. One has only to look at the terms "network of spies," "network of informers," and "networking" to see this relationship. It is also implied in military terms such as "gathering intelligence" and "reconnaissance." The architecture of these early networks--literally the roads that were constructed and the relay systems that were developed--is an evolutionary blueprint for the Internet and World Wide Web.

The earliest information networks predate the Roman cursus publicus road network by hundreds of years. In Greece between 1300 and 1100 B.C. signal fires were used to flash signals from mountain peak to mountain peak.5 Homer described this system in the Iliad:

Thus, from some far-away beleaguered island, where all day long the men have fought a desperate battle from their city walls, the smoke goes up to heaven; but no sooner has the sun gone down than the light from the line of beacons blazes up and shoots into the sky to warn the neighboring islanders and bring them to the rescue in their ships.6

Fire beacons are also mentioned by Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.), whose play Agamemnon opens with the lines: "And now I am watching for the signal of the beacon, the blaze of fire that brings a voice from Troy, and tidings of its capture."7 Fire was not the only signaling system used to create a messenger network. King Darius of Persia (522-486 B.C.) devised a signaling system so that news could be sent from the capital to the provinces of the Persian Empire by means of a line of shouting men positioned on heights, who could relay messages across distances equivalent to a thirty-day journey. According to Julius Caesar, the Gauls used a similar method and could call all their warriors to arms in just three days.

As early as the second millennium B.C. in Egypt and the first millennium B.C. in China, courier relay systems were developed using messengers on horseback and relay stations situated on major roads.8 References to messenger systems can be found that date back almost 4,000 years to the reign of Sesostris I (1971-1928 B.C.) of Egypt. Between 1792 and 1750 B.C., Hammurabi's messengers, by riding both day and night, were able to cover the 125 miles from Larsa to Babylon in two days. The Book of Jeremiah contains a reference to this relay system that shows it still operating in the time of King Nebuchadnezzar II (605-562 B.C.): "One post shall run to meet another, and one messenger to meet another, to show the king of Babylon that his city is taken."9

In Persia, King Cyrus the Great (599-530 B.C.) was credited with improvements to the courier system. Xenophon in Cryopaedia, his biography of Cyrus written more than a century later, described Cyrus's efforts:

He experimented to find out how great a distance a horse could cover in a day when ridden hard, but so as not to break down, and then he erected post-stations at just such distances and equipped them with horses, and men to take care of them; at each one of the stations he had the proper official appointed to receive the letters that were delivered and to forward them on, to take in the exhausted horses and riders and send on fresh ones. They say, moreover, that sometimes this express does not stop all night, but the night-messengers succeed the day-messengers in relays.10

The Persians used this highly developed system for fast and dependable communication between the capital and the distant regions of the Persian Empire, which stretched from modern-day Iran to Egypt. In his History, Herodotus expressed his admiration for how the relay system worked during Xerxes' rule (486-465 B.C.), in words that are still with us today:

There is nothing on earth faster than these couriers. . . . Men and horses are stationed a day's travel apart, a man and a horse for each of the days needed to cover such a journey. These men neither snow nor heat nor gloom of night stay from the swiftest possible completion of their appointed stage.11

In Egypt, using the relay system, the Ptolemies were able to set up the ancient world's nearest equivalent to a modern postal system. Egyptian post stations, set at six-hour intervals (by horseback) or roughly thirty miles apart, handled at least four deliveries daily, two each from north and south.12 Herodotus was amazed with the efficiency of the Egyptian system.

The Roman mail was another matter, and people often relied on travelers to take their mail to its destination. While on his way to Italy, Cicero wrote to his servant in Patras: "Have Acastus go down to the waterfront daily, because there will be lots of people to whom you can entrust letters and who will be glad to bring them to me. At my end I won't overlook a soul who is headed toward Patras."13 Over short distances the mail moved quickly; however, long distances could be a different matter. A letter that Cicero wrote from Rome to his son in Athens took seven weeks to reach its destination, while another from Rome to Athens took only three.14 (In the first instance, the courier ended up having to wait for the next available ship. In the second, the courier was lucky enough to find a ship waiting for him.)15 However, sometimes the postal system was remarkable. In 54 B.C., Julius Caesar's letter from Britain reached Cicero in Rome in twenty-nine days. In 1834, Robert Peel, hurrying to get back to Britain, took thirty days to travel from Rome to London.16 (As I write this, my e-mail program has just chimed in with its "you have mail!" message. Checking my e-mail, I see that I have a message from a librarian at Oxford's Bodleain Library in response to a message I sent just half an hour ago. Both ways these two messages have covered a distance inconceivable to the Romans and at a speed that would have amazed Peel.--ABK)

The roads built by the Romans beginning in 312 B.C. form the most famous of these ancient networks.17 The Roman Empire had 51,000 miles of paved highways and a network of secondary roads, which fanned out to link Rome with the distant areas of the empire. Aerial views of this system show the clear-sightedness of the Romans' long-distance network, which was not to be matched until the introduction of railroads in the nineteenth century. Many of these roads lasted for a thousand years without needing repair, and today many modern European roads run on top of the original Roman roads. Using this network of roads, it was possible to cover long distances with surprising efficiency. On one journey, Caesar was able to travel eight hundred miles in eight days. Messengers bringing the news of Nero's death covered 332 miles in thirty-six hours. The Roman postal system (despite Cicero's complaints) transported messages at an average of a hundred miles a day.18

The prosperity of the Roman Empire was largely built on quick military reaction: the ability to move troops efficiently over long distances and to transmit up-to-date information. The Roman Empire was knit together by its network of roads and outposts; its messengers, sailors, and horsemen; and Latin, its common language. Both the roads and Latin would continue to act as a network uniting the European continent long after the fall of the Roman Empire.

Across the Atlantic, the Incas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries A.D. (the period that saw the development and widespread use of the printing press in Europe) created a network system that has striking parallels to both the Roman system and modern computer networks. Like the Romans, the Incas had a highly evolved administrative system. Although they had no system for writing, they developed a unique method of record keeping and an efficient information network. The quipucamayoc, the Incan "accountants," developed a system to record births, deaths, crop yields and new laws on knotted, multicolored cords called quipus.19 The Incas constructed thousands of miles of roads along a 2,000-mile stretch of the Andes and the western South American coast. Along these roads, chasquis, specially trained runners, ran in relays between carefully spaced tambos, or way stations. They carried quipus and relayed the memorized news and the orders of the empire.

Sixty years before Columbus landed in the West Indies, the Incas began their imperial expansion. They called their empire Tabuantinsuyu, "the land of the four quarters." The four quarters (Antisuyu to the east; Chinchaysuyu to the north; Cuntisuyu along the coast; and Collasuyu to the south) were in turn subdivided into more than eighty provinces. At the center of Tabuantinsuyu was Cuzco, the Incan capital. Cuzco in the Incan language means "the navel"--or, in a manner of speaking, the center of the universe--and Cuzco, like Rome, was the hub for the vast network of highways that linked all parts of the Incan Empire. Along these thoroughfares moved mobile army units, accompanied by pack trains of llamas and by the chasquis who formed the Incan communications network. These were young relay runners who had been trained since childhood for the task of carrying messages from tambo to tambo. These runners would shout "chasquis" ("receive the message") as they approached a tambo. Arriving at a tambo, a runner would pass off his satchel to a waiting chasqui who would continue running to the next tambo.

If an army general in a remote province needed to send a message to Cuzco he would give the oral message to a chasqui, who would start running from his tambo to another chasqui, waiting outside another tambo. The message would be relayed for hundreds of miles by hundreds of runners, until the last runner reached Cuzco and told the message, exact to the original word, because a severe punishment awaited the transmission of an inaccurate message. The chasqui relay system was so fast that runners could carry fish from the coast to Cuzco in the high Andes and it would still be fresh when it arrived. These messengers formed a communications system that could guarantee one-day delivery for every 150 miles of road. The trek from present-day Lima to Cuzco took chasquis just three days, although 430 miles of very bad roads separated the two. (Two hundred years after the Incas, Spanish mail carried by horseback took twelve or thirteen days to cover the same distance.)

Like the Egyptian and Persian networks, the Incan network was a two-way system--information could flow in both directions between the receiver and the sender.20 On the Internet today, a group of latter-day Incas have adopted this communications system as the metaphor for "QuipuNet," their network. They explain that "QuipuNet will be using a 'chasqui' type of system to relay information from all parts of the world back to Peru, passing through 'electronic tambos' in order to reach not the Inca, but rather his descendants."21 However, the system that the Incas developed has ties with the Internet that go well beyond the metaphorical reference at QuipuNet.

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