Overland Travel Speed in the Arsacid Empire Era (From 1st century BCE to 3rd century CE)

There are reports considering armies, riders, and caravans’ movements in historical evidence and classical narratives, including departure and arrival times, or calculable. Also, there are accounts such as itineraries and similar evidence measuring distances between most parts of the Arsacid Empire. These two kinds of information, namely travel time and distance, provide necessary data for calculating riders, armies, and caravans’ travel speed. Gathering this sporadic information and calculating travel speed in the Arsacid empire era is the goal of this research to answer the following question: what was the overland travel speed in the Arsacid empire period? In the meantime, inaccuracies of the data available and the existence of impassable or unsecured routes forbade us to achieve an exact conclusion about the travel speed, so an approximate range has been calculated. By case study and comparing these calculations to previous ones in contemporary or previous eras, the range of couriers’ travel speed was between 80 to 277 km/day, the range of campaigns travel speed was between 10 to 50 km/day. The range of motion for trade caravans was between 40 to 60 km/day and for political delegations was 10 to 15 km/day.