Neither Snow Nor Rain
The US Postal Service motto is Herodotus describing Persian couriers, carved into granite without credit to either. Bridges get forgotten because their achievement is always recorded in somebody else's column.
On post offices across the United States there is an inscription: Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
It is the unofficial motto of the US Postal Service, and it is not American. It is Herodotus, in the fifth century BCE, describing with open admiration the Persian courier system of the Achaemenid Empire.
The words are carved into the granite of a federal building in Washington without attribution to the Greek who wrote them or the Persians he was writing about.
Which is, in one artefact, the whole subject of this book.
The Achaemenid Empire, founded by Cyrus in 550 BCE, was the largest the world had yet seen: Libya to the Indus, the Aral Sea to the cataracts of the Nile, something like 5.5 million square kilometres and, by one estimate, forty-four percent of the human population. Egyptians, Babylonians, Jews, Greeks, Indians, Scythians and dozens of other peoples, speaking dozens of languages, administered by a single system.