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A Saxon post milestone ((ドイツ語:kursächsische Postmeilensäule), colloquially ''sächsische Postmeilensäule'' or ''Postsäule'') was a milestone in the former Electorate of Saxony that gave distances and journey times to the nearest eight of an hour. The design of the milestones varied according to the distance at which they were placed. They were hewn out of natural stone and could take the shape of an obelisk, an ancient herma or a stele. Their prototype was the Roman milestone, in German a ''römische Meilensäule'', from which the rather inaccurate German description of ''Säule'' (lit.: "column") was derived. The Saxon head postal director (''Oberpostdirektor''), Paul Vermehren, brought about their inception based on official distance surveys, whose results were given in leagues on the post mileposts. A league in Saxony at that time (1722 to 1840) was meant to be an hour's journey, equivalent to half a mile or 4.531 kilometres. Saxon post milestones were set up during the reign of August the Strong and his successor along all important postal and trading routes and in almost all towns in the Electorate of Saxony to indicate the official distances. This was intended to be the basis for the creation of a unified calculation of postal charges. Because the Electorate of Saxony was at that time larger than the present-day German state of Saxony, these milestones are also found nowadays in the states of Thuringia, Brandenburg and Saxony-Anhalt, as well as in Poland. The locations and images of surviving or replaced Saxon milestones may be seen in the Gallery of Saxon post milestones. == Forerunners == In 1695, the head of the Saxon post office, ''Oberpostmeister'' Ludwig Wilhelm, proposed a systematic survey of the road from Leipzig to Dresden with wooden, roadside posts at regular intervals. This prompted prince elector Augustus the Strong, on 18 June 1695, to order ''"that certain mileposts are to be erected"''. He tasked the ''Konducteur'', Heinrich Niedhart, with carrying this out. The electoral Saxon master forester was instructed to make the wood available and the officials of the electoral Saxon districts were to ensure the posts were erected. Furthermore, before 1700 wooden fingerposts withs distance markings (so-called ''Arm(en)säulen'' or "arm columns") were commonplace on the roads of Saxony. These consisted of a wooden post, at the upper end of which were direction indicators in the shape of human arms and hands. Because the wood rotted rapidly as a result of its constant exposure to moisture, many of these fingerposts collapsed a few years after they had been erected and became unusable. The establishment of post milestones in electoral Saxony was not an isolated phenomenon. History indicates there was a number of countries in which such posts or stones with distances marked on them were erected along roads. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Saxon post milestone」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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