Salting the earth: Difference between revisions

Salting the earth, or sowing with salt, is the ritual of spreading salt on conquered cities to symbolize a curse on its re-inhabitation.^[1][2] It originated as a practice in the ancient Near East and became a well-established folkloric motif in the Middle Ages.^[3]

Destroying cities

The custom of purifying or consecrating a destroyed city and cursing anyone who dared to rebuild it was widespread in the ancient Near East, but it is unclear what part the sowing of salt has in the process.

Various Hittite and Assyrian texts speak of ceremonially strewing salt, minerals, or plants (cress, or kudimmu, which produced a kind of salt or lye) over destroyed cities, including Hattusa, Taidu, Arinna, Hunusa,^[4] Irridu,^[5] and Susa.^[6] The Book of Judges (9:45) says that Abimelech, the judge of the Israelites, sowed his own capital, Shechem, with salt, ca. 1050 BC, after quelling a revolt against him. This may have been part of a ḥērem ritual.^[7]

Various modern sources claim that the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus Africanus plowed over and sowed the city of Carthage with salt after defeating it in the Third Punic War (146 BC), sacking it, and forcing the survivors into slavery. However, no ancient source mentions this; the first references to the Roman salting of Carthage are found in the late 19th century,^[8] making it likely that the story is a later invention, modelled on the story of Shechem.^[9] The ritual of symbolically drawing a plow over the site of a city is, however, mentioned in ancient sources, though not in reference to Carthage specifically.^[10]

When Pope Boniface VIII destroyed Palestrina in 1299, he ordered it plowed "following the old example of Carthage in Africa", and also salted.^[11]

Later accounts of other destructions of medieval Italian cities are now rejected as unhistorical: Padua by Attila (452)--perhaps in a parallel between Attila and the ancient Assyrians; Milan by Frederick Barbarossa (1162); and Semifonte by the Florentines (1202).^[12][13]

Punishing traitors

In Spain and the Spanish Empire, salt was poured onto the land owned by a convicted traitor (often one who was executed and his head placed on a picota, or pike, afterwards) after his house was demolished. The practice was abandoned in the 17th century.^{[citation needed]}

Likewise, in Portugal, salt was also poured onto the land owned by a convicted traitor. The last known event of this sort was the destruction of the Duke of Aveiro's palace in Lisbon in 1759, due to his participation in the Távora affair (a conspiracy against King Joseph I of Portugal). His palace was demolished and his land was salted. A stone memorial now perpetuates the memory of the shame of the Duke, where it is written:

In this place were put to the ground and salted the houses of José Mascarenhas, stripped of the honours of Duque de Aveiro and others, convicted by sentence proclaimed in the Supreme Court of Inconfidences [i.e. conspiracies] on the 12th of January 1759. Put to Justice as one of the leaders of the most barbarous and execrable upheaval that, on the night of the 3rd of September 1758, was committed against the most royal and sacred person of the Lord Joseph I. In this infamous land nothing may be built for all time.

Other reasons

An ancient legend says that Odysseus feigned madness by yoking a horse and an ox to his plow and sowing salt.^[14]

See also

• Soil salinity and soil salinity control

Footnotes and references

Bibliography

• Gevirtz, Stanley Gevirtz (1963). "Jericho and Shechem: A Religio-Literary Aspect of City Destruction". Vetus Testamentum. 13 (Fasc. 1): 52–62. JSTOR 1516752.
• Ridley, R.T. (1986). "To Be Taken with a Pinch of Salt: The Destruction of Carthage". Classical Philology. 81 (2). JSTOR 269786.
• Stevens, Susan T. (1988). "A Legend of the Destruction of Carthage". Classical Philology. 83 (1): 39–41. JSTOR 269635.
• Visona, Paolo (1988). "On the Destruction of Carthage Again". Classical Philology. 83 (1): 41–42. JSTOR 269636.
• Warmington, B.H. (1988). "The Destruction of Carthage: A Retractatio". Classical Philology. 84 (4): 308–310. JSTOR 269510.