Administration and Logistics in the Ancient/Hellenistic world

[CBR]

Did the Seleukids, Romans and other empires have a dedicated team of trained, experienced couriers who were tasked with the urgent matters or did they just use "normal" couriers?

Not that I know of, but I would think it was logical to pick the best riders and horses available. At least the Romans who had to pick a man who had to go through the whole route.

If urgent messages didn't happen often, it might be overkill to have dedicated teams for it, IMO.

[Montmorency]

Don't forget that larger empires like the Romans and the Achaemenids/Parthians/Sassanids had dedicated secret-service bureaucracies (e.g. Roman frumentarii, Achaemenid spasaka/King's Eyes), and they would have operated along the signal system according to their own internal standards and with their own agents, since their transmissions would have basically constituted Classified/Top Secret material. Most of the messages passed along this subsystem would have been related to internal operations, but as these would have often constituted high-priority reading for the emperors/autocrats, and the agents were already used to carrying out that sort of clandestine stuff, I'm sure that especially-sensitive direct orders from the head honcho(s) would have utilized this network as well. At the very least, regular royal messengers and secret service messengers could have been utilized at a single moment by a ruler to, for example, mislead spies or test loyalties by having two variants of the same order submitted. And so on, whatever political maneuvering you could think of. Unsurprisingly, the heads of secret services would have tended to be very powerful men, close to the right hand of the autocrat.

[edyzmedieval]

Cheers Montmorency and CBR for the replies.

How did the signal system work, particularly over such a large geographical area?