Tourism through the Ages - Tourism: Principles, Practices, Philosophies - page 31

Therewerenotmany that could take wheeled traf c. A king of Ur bragged that he went

from Nippur to Ur, a distance of some 100 miles, and back in a day. This boast, sometime around
2050 B . C . E ., implies the existence of a carriage road. 10 Even the best of the highways, however, were
minimal. Paving was almost nonexistent until the time of the Hittites, who paved a mile and a third
of road between their capital and a nearby sanctuary to carry heavily loaded wagons on festal days.
Even then their war chariots, light horse-drawn carts invented for war, rolled over the countryside
on dirt roads. Also, bridges were rare in a land that experienced frequent flooding. A hymn tells of
King Shulgi exulting

early roads

. . . but not
every Mesopotamian monarch was a Shulgi, and there must have been long periods with nobody to
'

''' I enlarged the footpaths, straightened the highways of the land '

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straighten ' the roads. '''

Roads were better on the island of Crete, where the Minoans flourished from 2000 to 1500 B . C . E .,
and on the Greek peninsula of the Mycenaeans, who flourished from 1600 to 1200 B . C . E . 12 A two-lane
road, 13 1 / 2 feet wide, ran from the coast of Crete to the capital at Knossos. In Greece, roads were
usually one lane, although some were as much as 11 1 / 2 feet wide, making two-way traf c possible.
Bridges and culverts kept them passable.
Who traveled? Mainly three groups: the military, government of cials, and caravans. The warlike
Assyrians, like the Romans after them, realized that roads were basic to moving their war chariots
ef ciently. As their empire expanded from the Mediterranean in the west to the Persian Gulf in the
east, the Assyrians improved roads, largely for military use.
The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2000 B . C . E .) recounts the travels of a Sumerian king who is given
directions by a deity. By only a slight stretch of the imagination, Gilgamesh ' s deity might be regarded

as the first travel guide! This adds a fourth reason — in addition to money, writing, and the wheel — to

credit the Sumerians with the beginnings of the travel industry.
The history of roads is thus related to the centralizing of populations in powerful cities. Alexander
the Great found well-developed roads in India in 326 B . C . E . In Persia (now Iran), all the cities and
provinces were connected to the capital, Susa, by roads built between 500 and 400 B . C . E . One of these
roads was 1,500 miles long.
The started building roads in about 150 B . C . E . These were quite elaborate in construction.

The roadway was surveyed using a cross staff hung with plumb bobs. Soldiers and laborers dug the
roadbed, and then stones and concrete were evenly placed. Paving stones were then laid on top, and
the highway was edged with curbstones and contoured to a sloping crown to shed the rain. Some of
these roads are still in use.
By the time of Emperor Trajan (ruled from 98 to 117 C . E .), the Roman roads comprised a
network of some 50,000 miles. They girdled the Roman Empire, extending from near Scotland
and Germany in the north to well within Egypt in the south and along the southern shores of the
Mediterranean Sea. To the east, roads extended to the Persian Gulf in what is now Iraq and
Kuwait.
The Romans could travel as much as 100miles a day using relays of horses furnished from rest posts
five to six miles apart. Romans also journeyed to see famous temples in the Mediterranean area,
particularly the pyramids and monuments of Egypt. Greece and Asia Minor were popular destinations,
offering the Olympic Games, medicinal baths and seaside resorts, theatrical productions, festivals,
athletic competitions, and other forms of amusement and entertainment. The Roman combination of
empire, roads, the need for overseeing the empire, wealth, leisure, tourist attractions, and the desire
for travel created a demand for accommodations and other tourist services that came into being as an
early form of tourism.
Roman tourists went about sightseeing much as we do today. They used guidebooks, employed
guides, left graf ti everywhere, and bought souvenirs. The examples are diverse and often amusing.
The only guidebook to survive from ancient times is a guidebook of Greece, written by a Greek named
Pausanias between 160 and 180 C . E . (during the reigns of emperors Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and
Marcus Aurelius). This guide

Romans

marks a milestone in the history of tourism. He [Pausanias] is the direct
ancestor of the equally sober and unimaginative, painstakingly comprehensive and scrupulously
accurate Karl Baedeker.

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