(By: Dorothy K. Moore, PhD)
Below is a quick snapshot of the significant role salt has played in the history of the world.
During the Stone Age, the red meat the people hunted contained enough salt that they didn’t need to look elsewhere for this important mineral.
By 10,000 BC, however, people began to farm the land. By cultivating rice, wheat, barley, millet, they reduced their red meat intake. The cows and sheep they kept on their farms needed salt too. Not only did the people need salt in their diets, but they needed it as a food preservative too. Bacon, ham, salted fish, and pickles are all examples of food that is preserved using salt.
During the Neolithic Age settlements grew around salt springs and caravans transported salt across the desert trading salt for gold – ounce for ounce!
It was around 6,000 BC at Northern China’s Lake YunCheng that we see evidence of people first harvesting and producing salt.
In 3,000 BC the Ancient Egyptians of the Old Kingdom were preserving meat and fish with salt. They also used salt to preserve mummies. The Egyptians obtained their salt by evaporating water from the Mediterranean Sea water and by buying it from nearby Libya, Sfax Tunisia, and Nubia.
2700 BC the ancient Chinese wrote of the 40 different kinds of salt they knew.
By 800 BC the Chinese were able to produce salt by filling clay jars with ocean water and boiling the water until only the salt remained. During the Eastern Chou dynasty about one or two hundred years later, they learned how to make iron from West Asia, and so started boiling the salt water from iron pans.
Others who used evaporation to produce salt included the Etruscans of Italy, the early Romans, and the Carthaginians in North Africa.
During this same period (700 BC) the Indo-Europeans Celts were mining salt underground in what is now Austria, Hungary, South Germany, and Poland. They sold their salt to other people including the Greeks, Etruscans, Carthaginians, and possibly the Phoenicians. The Celts also sold salami, ham, and bacon in exchange for glass and pottery.
The Ancient Greeks sold their slaves in exchange for salt.
Roman soldiers were paid a salarium in salt. We are now paid salaries.
A salt tax was one of the factors contributing to the French Revolution.
As Napoleon was retreating from Moscow, many of his troops died for lack of salt.
The first Europeans in America experienced great commercial success when they learned to salt the fish they caught in order to transport it to their home markets.
As early as 1654 Onondaga Indians near Syracuse, New York, were accessing underground salt deposits and boiling the saline water.
Access to salt often directed the migration of early pioneer migration west.
During the Civil War the North blockaded the Atlantic coast so that precious salt supplies could not reach the South, including the Confederate Army. For four years the Southerners relentlessly struggled to get enough salt into their diet, a situation aggravated by the flourishing black market.
The Erie Canal in the United States was built primarily to transport salt.
India’s struggle for Independence from colonial Britain reached a climax when Mahatma Ghandi’s trekked to the sea to make his own (untaxed) salt.
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