A day's journey in pre-modern literature, including the

Bible The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity Christianity is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus ...

, ancient geographers and ethnographers such as

Herodotus Herodotus ( ; grc, , }; BC) was an ancient Greek historian and geographer from the Greek city of Halicarnassus, part of the Persian Empire (now Bodrum, Turkey) and a later citizen of Thurii in modern Calabria (Italy). He is known fo ...

, is a measurement of distance. In the Bible, it is not as precisely defined as other Biblical measurements of distance; the distance has been estimated from . records a party of three people and two mules who traveled from

Bethlehem Bethlehem (; ar, بيت لحم ; he, בֵּית לֶחֶם '' '') is a city in the central West Bank, Palestine, about south of Jerusalem. Its population is approximately 25,000,Amara, 1999p. 18.Brynen, 2000p. 202. and it is the capital ...

Gibeah Gibeah (; he, גִּבְעָה ''Gīḇəʿā''; he, גִּבְעַת, link=no ''Gīḇəʿaṯ'') is the name of three places mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, in the tribes of Benjamin, Judah, and Ephraim respectively. Gibeah of Benjamin is th ...

, a distance of about 10 miles, in an afternoon. Porter notes that a mule can travel about 3 miles per hour, covering 24 miles in an eight-hour day. In translation by J.B. Bury (Priscus, fr. 8 in Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum) ''We set out with the barbarians, and arrived at Sardica, which is thirteen days for a fast traveller from

Constantinople la, Constantinopolis ota, قسطنطينيه , alternate_name = Byzantion (earlier Greek name), Nova Roma ("New Rome"), Miklagard/Miklagarth (Old Norse), Tsargrad ( Slavic), Qustantiniya (Arabic), Basileuousa ("Queen of Cities"), Megalopolis (" ...

.'' From Constantinople-Istanbul to Sofia is 550–720 km distance at a pace between 42 and 55 km /day. Based on a comprehensive review of references in

, Geus Klaus Geus, "A Day's Journey in Herodotus' Histories", in: Klaus Geus and Martin Thiering (Eds.), Common Sense Geography and Mental Modelling, Berlin: Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 2012, 110–118 concludes that "Herodotus has a very well-defined notion of what distance a traveller can cover under normal circumstances in a day (between 150 and 200 stades or roughly, between 27 and 40 kilometres)," though he cites some exceptional examples of over 100 km per day.

Notes

Units of length Biblical phrases {{Bible-stub