An Intriguing History of Salt: Currency, Trade Routes, Finance, Empires (2002)
Humans have always tended to build communities either around source of salt, or where they can trade for it.
All through history the availability of salt has been pivotal to civilization. The word "salary" comes from the
Latin word for salt because the
Roman Legions were sometimes paid in salt, which was quite literally worth its weight in gold. In
Britain, the suffix "
-wich" in a placename means it was once a source of salt, as in
Sandwich and
Norwich. The
Natron Valley was a key region that supported the
Egyptian Empire to its north, because it supplied it with a kind of salt that came to be called by its name, natron.
Even before this, what is now thought to have been the first city in
Europe is
Solnitsata, in
Bulgaria, which was a salt mine, providing the area now known as the
Balkans with salt since
5400 BC.[3] Even the name Solnisata means "salt works".
While people have used canning and artificial refrigeration to preserve food for the last hundred years or so, salt has been the best-known food preservative, especially for meat, for many thousands of years.[4] A very ancient salt-works operation has been discovered at the Poiana Slatinei archaeological site next to a salt spring in Lunca,
Neamț County,
Romania.
Evidence indicates that Neolithic people of the Precucuteni
Culture were boiling the salt-laden spring water through the process of briquetage to extract the salt as far back as 6050 BC.[5] The salt extracted from this operation may have had a direct correlation to the rapid growth of this society's population soon after its initial production began.[6] The harvest of salt from the surface of
Xiechi Lake near
Yuncheng in
Shanxi, China, dates back to at least
6000 BC, making it one of the oldest verifiable saltworks.[7]
There is more salt in animal tissues such as meat, blood and milk, than there is in plant tissues.[8]
Nomads who subsist on their flocks and herds do not eat salt with their food, but agriculturalists, feeding mainly on cereals and vegetable matter, need to supplement their diet with salt.[9] With the spread of civilization, salt became one of the world's main trading commodities. It was of high value to the ancient
Hebrews, the
Greeks, the
Romans, the Byzantines, the Hittites and other peoples of antiquity
. In the Middle East, salt was used to ceremonially seal an agreement, and the ancient Hebrews made a "covenant of salt" with God and sprinkled salt on their offerings to show their trust in Him.[10] An ancient practice in time of war was salting the earth: scattering salt around in a defeated city in order to prevent plant growth.
Abimelech was ordered by God to do this at
Shechem,[11] and various texts claim that the
Roman general Scipio Aemilianus Africanus ploughed over and sowed the city of
Carthage with salt after it was defeated in the
Third Punic War (146 BC).
Salt may have been used for barter in connection with the obsidian trade in
Anatolia in the
Neolithic Era.[13]
Herodotus described salt trading routes across
Libya back in the
5th century BC. In the early years of the
Roman Empire, roads such as the
Via Salaria were built for the transportation of salt from the salt pans of
Ostia to the capital.[14] Salt was included among funeral offerings found in ancient
Egyptian tombs from the third millennium BC, as were salted birds, and salt fish.[15] From about
2800 BC, the
Egyptians began exporting salt fish to the
Phoenicians in return for
Lebanon cedar, glass and the dye
Tyrian purple; the Phoenicians traded
Egyptian salt fish and salt from
North Africa throughout their
Mediterranean trade empire.[16]
In
Africa, salt was used as currency south of the
Sahara, and slabs of rock salt were used as coins in
Abyssinia.[9]
Moorish merchants in the
6th century traded salt
for gold, weight for weight. The
Tuareg have traditionally maintained routes across the Sahara especially for the transportation of salt by Azalai (salt caravans). The caravans still cross the desert from southern
Niger to
Bilma, although much of the trade now takes place by truck. Each camel takes two bales of fodder and two of trade goods northwards and returns laden with salt pillars and dates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt