Re: Did ancient conquerors punish their enemies by sowing captured fields with salt? I’d think it would be cheap and easy, at least if your victims were reasonably close to the ocean. (And what better place for a city to form than by a harbor?) The expense of salt lay in extracting it from sea water, right? Here you could just water the fields with sea water: no expensive firewood or chancy solar ponds needed. You could even have a few of your soldiers force the conquered people to do it themselves–free labor and extra demoralizing.
As an aside, I once salted the earth in a small way. We were growing, uh, illicit herbal products in a closet, and the other guy seemed to think “Three may keep a secret, if two are dead” meant “Tell everyone you meet to make them like you.” I finally watered the poor innocent darlings with salt water.
“Dude, our babies don’t look so good. What do you think we’re doing wrong?”
Watering with sea water is difficult; it’s at sea level and you have to move it UP to the fields, an expensive and energy consuming endeavor.
Salt was often simply scraped up from salt pans or from the edge of ocean waters in places where formation of salt crusts was usual. So it’s often the case that to sow salt would have simply involved scraping up the salt and then taking in inland. However, I tend to doubt the concept (and did when I was a kid reading about Carthage) because it would take a damn lot of salt and probably would be fairly ineffective over a widespread area.
I’ve always understood that the word ‘salary’ came from the Roman practise of paying its soldiers with salt, yet the column is suggesting that salt was freely available from salt pans and the like.
I don’t know what the cost of materials was for salt in ancient times (though I suspect it was prohibitive). But in present times, the largest cost would be for physically moving the material. Enough salt to affect the salinity significantly enough to compromise fertility would be an enormous amount of material. A large volume, and a large weight. In present times, we would use vehicles powered by fossil fules. In ancient times, they would use human labor for loading and unloading, and animal labor for moving and spreading.
The longevity of this attack on fertility would depend upon rainfall. Lots of rain --> pretty soon, the (expensively delivered) salt is leached away.
Did Cecil mean per *cubic * yard of soil? Otherwise it is a clumsy estimate, as a square yard is a two dimensional measurement, and strictly speaking, cannot contain two ounces of salt, much less two hundred pounds. I used to work with bulk salt which came in 80lb. bags, and two hundred pounds would cover one square yard a couple of inches deep, at which point it ceases to be soil. We need a measure of volume here, such as cubic yards, to know what level of salinization is occurring in Australia.
It is my understanding that many places, like Carthage, would have been a near subsistance level in terms of crops. So, if one year was ruined, it would cause a very large problem, in terms of famine, disease, and everything else that comes with it.
So, I think it only took enough salt, salt water, or whatever, to ruin that year’s crops to do the damage. If there is no food, and none will grow, they have to leave to where they can get food. Then, even by next year, they might be able to start rebuilding, if they are willing to go back there.
I could be wrong but I thought that’s what it meant.
…which is why he said “square yard of surface”, which is probably the figure as he received it, and which probably means “down to the bottom of the soil layer”.
I think actually what Cecil said was precisely the right thing to say. The issue here is that irrigation combined with removal of trees has caused the watertable to move up, bringing the salt with it. Therefore the issue is, precisely, how much salt there is below a given unit area of surface soil, to be brought up to the surface.
In one of Bill Bryson’s books (“The Mother Tongue”, IIRC), he claims that the phrase ‘salt money’ (from which ‘salary’ derives) was an ironic phrase used by the soldiers: “They feed us, and they pay us money too – it’s enough to buy salt with”. As opposed to the pay being officially designated as “salt money”.
Just a comment to the other part of the question. Here in Norway there is a growing concern that excessive salting of the roads have increased the salt contents of some roadside lakes to the levels that fish can’t survive. It’s consequences can also be seen on many trees by the roads.
