By Dimitra Mylona and Roxani Margariti.
Sea salt: a commodity with so many attributes. Precious and common, life giving but also corroding and destructive, ordinary and mundane but also cultic and symbolic. Οften contested and, at times, even revolutionary.
Salt of the earth is the biblical phrase that lives on in popular culture—not least of all in the Rolling Stones ode to the working class! The expression, born in Gospel Greek and common in the English language, is just one example of the many different meanings that salt has come to symbolize round the world. And sometimes, salt itself, not as a symbol but as an actual part of human material culture, becomes the stuff of poetry.
She is the loving daughter of a salt merchant who goes through mountains cracked by the sun’s heat, in his fast bullock cart, goading his oxen with a stick, to sell his white grainy salt, made in the salt pans without plowing, near the seashore in a small settlement of fishermen who hunt the huge ocean for fish. She walks through the settlement with salt, swaying her hands, jingling her round, bright bangles and shouting, “equal measure of white grainy salt for rice paddy!” Hearing her voice, a dog from a nearby house barks, and her eyes that resemble proud, fighting carp fish reveal her fear. Akanānūru 140, Ammoovanār, Neythal Thinai – What the hero said to his friend, poem translated by the literary scholar Vaidehi Herbert.
This excerpt of a poem, about a love-struck man and the object of his affections, the daughter of a salt merchant, was composed somewhere in Tamil country in southeast India, sometime between the first and the 7th century CE. Framing the beloved’s portrait, is a fleeting but lucid and realistic image of coastal people and salt harvesting. The poet thus introduces us to the strong link forged between shores and hinterland by salt, the subject of this post!
Salt has been a truly important element in human nutrition and culture, right up there with cereals, meat and spices. As Mark Kurlansky notes in his popular book on the world history of salt, there is scholarly consensus that once humans settled down and became farmers and herders, some 9.000 years ago, they had to add sodium chloride, salt, to their diet in order to stay healthy. This led to a universal bid to acquire salt, sometimes across vast distances, and has driven humans to make far-flung connections, build roads, create trading hubs, establish monopolies, construct industrial facilities, devise taxation systems, and even wage war. Salt has flavored literature and folklore with metaphors about purity, essence, spirit, beauty, brilliance, wit, sharpness, cleanliness, power, and other qualities that it has come to represent. Robert Multhauf says it all in his book aptly titled Neptune’s Gift: human efforts to solve their “salt problem” constitute a “distinctive thread in the fabric of human history.”
There are countless essays, articles, public media reports, blog posts, and a few great books about the history of salt, and it’s been a joy to begin exploring those as we write this post. Even analytical psychology, including its founder Carl Jung, took note of the prevalence of salt symbolism in human culture. Especially interesting is a 1912 essay by Ernest Jones entitled “The Symbolic Significance of Salt in Folklore and Superstition,” and in a way setting the stage for world histories of salt. Robert Multhauf’s study is an exhaustive academic compendium of information, mostly focused on Greco-Roman and European history of salt use and production, with significant excursions into East Asia’s relationship to salt. More recently, Mark Kulansky produced the widely acclaimed world history of salt mentioned above. All these works present the mind-blowing richness of salt culture!
In this post we do not adopt such a wide vista, but instead focus on an aspect of salt that seems intriguing. What is it that makes salt such a strong link between the coast and the hinterland? How was this achieved in the past, in the area of our interest, i.e. East Mediterranean and the Western Indian Ocean?
What is salt?
Salt comes from the sea but is born from eons’ long processes: rainwater slowly erodes rocks on earth’s surface, underwater vents release elements of the earth’s magma in the water, and they all supply the sea with ions of various chemical elements. The two most common such ions in seawater are sodium and chloride. These are the basic building blocks of common salt, hence its scientific name sodium chloride (NaCl).
Nowadays, we find salt in two main forms. Truly ancient seas evaporated, and the salt deposits left behind were eventually buried. As the earth’s surface changed, what was once the seabed eventually became plains and mountains. The salt of those primordial seas became a hardened mineral that is now extracted from surface or underground mines built like bizarre cavernous cathedrals! Pink, blue, white, ivory… the color palette is impressive. These salt rocks even give birth to salt springs and salt rivers that allow the salt cultivation technology to reach the hinterland.
The largest source of salt, however, is the sea, the ultimate recipient of the continuously dissolved salt ions. The sea is brine; thick or diluted, it is always salty. When sea water is trapped on dry land and exposed to heat (sun or fire) evaporation leaves behind the white, sparkling crystals of salt. People sourced salt from sea water for millennia—and of course they still do. In the process, they invented a wide range of creative technologies, a sample of which is showcased in the bibliography. In this post, we will focus primarily on salt harvested on the seashores in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean region in the past. It is those seas’ salt that we explore for all it can tell us about connections between humans and the sea and about links forged between shores and hinterlands in antiquity and the Middle Ages.
Sea salt of the deep past
Sea salt production has been studied extensively in some regions of the world and in certain periods in history, yet our understanding of this technology, its variants and its development over time remains patchy. The extensive salt flats of the western and central Mediterranean, for example, with their high yields and history-altering significance, have attracted much attention and have set the agenda for the way we understand and visualize salt production in the whole Mediterranean, Red Sea and West Indian Ocean.
In this blog we have seen, time and again, that next to the celebrated and much discussed maritime phenomena of large scale, there are always, smaller scale equivalents that provide long lasting, sustainable solutions, very important on the local or regional level. Salt production is no exception.
When Nikolaos Platon, an important figure in Cretan archaeology, excavated in the 1960’s the Minoan Palace of Zakros (2nd mil. BCE, ca 1900-1600/1550 BCE) on the East coast of Crete, he expanded his explorations in the so-called Gorge of the Dead, a dry ravine cut deep on the rocky hills of the region and found something unique. Shallow rock shelters on the walls of the gorge functioned as graves in Minoan times, and the largest of them the “Eyebrow of Ourania” was found packed with storage vessels, beekeeping items and other tools, magnificent wild goat horn-cores, good quality grains and, totally unexpectedly, pots containing salt! The salt was, and still is, an unparalleled find. Decades later, Katerina Kopaka of the University of Crete published the findings from this rock shelter. In collaboration with Nikos Chaniotakis the Minoan salt was properly analyzed and published.
The analysis concluded that at around that time, people at Zakros made use of the salty sea waters of the region to produce salt. They processed it, pounding and sieving it to achieve a fine consistency. Some of it was left unprocessed in its rough crystalline from. They used it to preserve some as yet unidentified organic matter, and, also, stored it in its pure form for future use. The relatively small size of its crystal structure tells us that that salt was gathered in cool weather, perhaps in spring or autumn. The pure sea salt and the salted preserved foods were stored in clay vessels. Those seem to be of the usual domestic shapes (cups, open mouthed jugs) and not specialized for salt. The inclusion of salt in Minoan culture has been hypothesized and several lines of indirect evidence seem to support the hypothesis. The Zakros find is the first concrete and indisputable proof for it.
The Minoan pots that hold sea salt at the rock shelter at Zakros were not made for salt. They do, however, pose the question: why ceramic pots rather than skins or other containers that would have perhaps been lighter and more versatile? While leather bags may well have been used, being invisible to us now, a possible explanation for the use of clay containers for salt emerges from the study of the specialized sea salt vessels known as “augets.” Augets are a type of conical vessel, usually ceramic, in which salt is packed and transported. Augets are essentially molds: once the salt reaches its destination, it is extracted from the auget and sold as an auget-shaped cake or lump. In a fascinating article about Mesopotamian salt production in antiquity, Daniel Potts points out the similarity of such ceramic vessels used to pack and trade salt in surprisingly diverse times and places, from Japan to North America and everywhere in between! He explains that packing salt in conical ceramic vessels is practical and cheap. The ceramic fabric allows for the residual moisture in the salt to sweat out; the salt thus forms a compact and dry cake. Moreover, the auget shape is easy to hold in one hand while using the other to do the packing. Clay vessels of this kind can be easily and cheaply mass produced. Large numbers of solid footed conical goblets were found in temples and living quarters in early 3rd-millennium Mesopotamia, where texts speak of salt as an important commodity with many uses, including ritual. Given the general similarity in shape between the Mesopotamian solid-footed goblets and the augets of other times and places, Potts speculates that the goblets may well have been salt receptacles/molds!
Salt production was certainly not a new technology in the second millennium, when the Zakros finds confirm salt producing practices in Crete. Archaeological finds and texts dating a few centuries earlier document the production and trade in salt even in the landlocked kingdoms of central Anatolia. As we just saw, Mesopotamia had a long tradition in salt production and trade, dating as far back as the early third millennium. Also, Egyptians traded in salted preserved fish and birds for several centuries already. But where did the Zakros people find their salt? Did they master the art of maintaining and harvesting salt flats? Where there such marshy flats even available on the rocky shores of east Crete? Or did they gather salt from rock pools along the shore in a much less structured but quite efficient way, like the modern inhabitants of the region do?
Salt on the rocks (or, the salty cloak of invisibility)
When sea water is trapped in hollows of the rocks on the wave line, in sunny, warm and dry days, it evaporates, leaving behind a residue of salts, mostly sodium chloride (NaCl), (but other salts as well). The exposed sea water in these pools gets progressively denser and saltier, to the point that large, bright white crystals of salt are formed on the surface. They gradually sink to the bottom until, eventually, the water evaporates completely. This happens on ragged, rocky coasts of temperate and arid regions all the time.
People have taken advantage of this self-grown salt supply, which only requires gathering. A basket or a sack and a pair of hands is often all that is needed and several kilograms of salt can be taken back home with every trip to the shore. Depending on conditions fresh salt can be generated several times every season.
The productivity of this arrangement is by necessity limited. It all depends on the number and size of suitable hollows on the rocks, on the number of people prowling the shore looking for salt, and of course on the weather conditions. Some of these parameters are beyond human control but others can be improved. Ethnographic research by Giannis Saitas and Kornilia Zarkia , in the region of Mani, in the southern Peloponnese, illustrates this issue and a range of possible arrangements very vividly.
The rocks on the shore were private property that passed from generation to generation within families and could be rented out. The salt harvesters, locally called alikarii (a term rooted in the ancient Greek word for salt and the sea, ἅλς-als) could either just collect self-grown salt from the pools, or, they could cultivate it. The rock hollows could be enlarged, rudimentary stone walls and some water proofing could expand their extend, and regular replenishment of the water in them, by hand or using a pump could increase salt crop significantly.
The shores of regions that produced salt in this manner have been modified over the years and are now dotted with vague traces of salt-related activities – strange, unexpected cavities or walls on the wave line, traces of flat mortared structures on dry land, small stone buildings near the coast. They are the traces of past human activities that archaeologists often record on the coastscape. Such features, however, are notoriously difficult to date, and this together with poor understanding of the processes of salt cultivation and gathering has left a wide research gap on the topic. Additionally, this type of salt producing activity is small scale, usually serving household or local needs and, similarly to small scale fishing and fish processing, it often escapes state records and regulations, thus becoming invisible to traditional historical research.
Salty flatlands
Gathering salt from rock hollows along the shoreline leads to a very moderate crop. If, however, salt was to be gathered from the low-lying alluvial flatlands near river estuaries and coastal lagoons, or from the tide-drenched flat beaches of drier coasts, the productive potential would increase a lot. The flat lands get regularly flooded, especially in tidal areas, and evaporation leaves behind a thick layer of salt to be collected. When humans intervene, the picture becomes more complicated; the salt flats get modified, divided into neatly arranged salt pans and ditches and paths are built between them, pumping systems are set up to facilitate and intensify the flooding, and transportation and storage facilities are built to support salt productivity.
These highly modified and well organized salt pans have been crucial to transforming sea salt into a widely marketable commodity. Salt pans mobilized a large seasonal work force, including women and children, and their works left behind a clear historical trace, through taxation and other formal economic and legal transactions, inherent in any industrial endeavor.
The use of coastal flatlands for the production of sea salt through successive stages of evaporation is already documented in the classical Greek world, while technological variations and improvements are best documented in the byzantine period. Those are said to be adoptions from the Arabο-Islamic world. Indeed, Arabic geographical tradition provides revealing examples of port cities’ connection with salt flats early on. Τhe anonymous author of the 11th century geographical compendium known as The Book of Curiosities tells us that the Egyptian island town of Tinnis in the Nile’s Delta had a suburb in the vicinity of “saline lands that produce salt of unsurpassed brightness, flavour, and quality.”
Not all salt flats are exactly coastal or in close proximity to the shore. In a famous passage about salt Strabo, in the 1st century BCE, describes the northeast Arabian city of Gerrha, which has been identified with the archaeological site of Thaj, now in Saudi Arabia. There, “the soil contains salt and the people live in houses made of salt; and since flakes of salt continually scale off, owing to the scorching heat of the rays of the sun, and fall away, the people frequently sprinkle the houses with water and thus keep the walls firm.” In the following century, Pliny also mentions Gerrha and its towers built of salt blocks. Strabo is clear that Gerrha is at a distance of 200 stades from the shore and a quick look at Thaj on the map reveals that Gerrha was not on the coast. It was situated on inland saline flats known by the Arabic term sabkha, the same name used for salt flats whether on the shore or inland.
Like Pliny’s and Strabo’s descriptions of Arabian Gerrha, Ibn Battuta’s 14th century report on the much further inland salt hub of Taghāzā, in northern Mali, is well-known and often quoted. We have been encountering the Moroccan traveler since our very first blog post, and this too is an iconic passage from his remarkable travels. He tells us that Taghāzā “is a village with no attractions. A strange thing about it is that its houses and mosque are built of blocks of salt and roofed with camel skins. There are no trees, only sand in which there is a salt mine. They dig the ground and thick salt slabs are found in it, lying on each other as if they had been cut and stacked under the ground.”
Ibn Battuta then describes the social scene: only enslaved mine workers live in Taghaza, and their food is imported dates. Subsaharan African traders, he tells us, come to Taghaza just to get the salt and sell it in distant places; as the distance from the mines increases so does the price that the salt fetches, by a lot! These traders, he says, “trade with salt as others trade with gold and silver. They cut it in pieces and buy and sell with these. For all its squalor qintars and qintars (a qintar is a unit of weight, divided into 100 pounds) of gold dust are traded there.”
Taghaza brings before us images of spectacular caravans, and camels carrying impressive loads of salt from inland flats and mines to distant ocean shores. It also raises the question of labor. Even though often said in jest, the English metaphor “working in the salt mines “or back to the salt mines” conjures hard, tedious, dangerous, and enforced work. Prisoners and, as we see in Ibn Battuta’s narrative, enslaved workers labored in salt mines. Free men and women did and do too. While we cannot go deep into this subject here, it is worth taking note of inequities and struggles in this line of work that still exist to this day. If we go by Pliny and Ibn Battuta alone, the inland salt hubs were particularly dismal places. Life was hard there. Inland flats, dedicated entirely to the production of salt and producing enormous quantities, offer perhaps a counterpoint to the smaller-scale production of shoreline salt outlined above. There we observe the more integrated and complementary economy of shoreline places, where salt is one of the commodities produced and where the sea and its complementary economy dominate.
Salt in the hinterland
Salt is indispensable in human biology: a basic element for proper function of the nervous system, muscles, and nutrient and water balance. Salt is contained in animal flesh and through its consumption it enters the human body. In sedentary agricultural societies, however, where diet is based on the basic food plants (e.g. cereals) and eating of meat and fish is infrequent, salt deficiency can be a menace. The health of herd animals, such as cattle, sheep and goats, is also dependent on salt. No less important in the temperate and sub-tropical regions of the Mediterranean, Near East and the West Indian Ocean, is the salt’s preservative quality. It turns fresh perishable (and often seasonally abundant) products into durable, storable and marketable items, solving problems of food storage and offering opportunities for trade and wealth. Access to salt is paramount and has been so for millennia. But how can the coastal abundance in salt solve the problems of inland’s lack of it?
In this post we do not touch upon the inland salt mines or the salt springs that are found scattered in areas of the buried ancient seas. Instead, we explore the way coastal sea salt reached inland valleys and mountain plateaus, oases and remote locations, far from the sea, sometimes over vast distances. We will also briefly comment on the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon, of inland produced salt being transported and used in coastal areas, despite those region’s potential to produce their own sea salt.
We have already mentioned how the Egyptians of the Bronze Age traded widely in salted fish and birds, sending the sea salt produced in their territories to far away, and often landlocked places. Several scholars mapped this activity. They recorded all the non-coastal archaeological sites where bones of marine or non-local fish have been found. Because of the distance of those sites from the sea (over 60 km, or else, more than a day’s travel), the fish could not be transported there fresh but rather preserved. In the region of East Mediterranean and Middle East, where this research took place, preservation without some salting is not possible, due to environmental conditions. Spoiling takes place just a few hours after capture.
This phenomenon is even better documented in the Greco-Roman world. Garum, dry salted fish and fish in brine, with various forms, textures and tastes, were traded over long distances from the Mediterranean (and the Atlantic) coasts to central and northern Europe. It is interesting that in cookbooks of this period, there is very scant reference to salt as a cooking ingredient, while fish sources of various types are basic ingredients, providing the necessary salt to food. For more on the salty necessities of the ancient world, check out our post on garum!
As Dan Potts notes,“The wide variety of salt sources and the recognition of the different properties of salts from different regions is reflected in the nomenclature associated with salt which has come down to us.” Akkadian and Assyrian salt vocabulary from Bronze Age Mesopotamia illustrates this point, as much as do the many epithets given to salt in the medieval Arabic sources.
The salt itself could be processed with the addition of herbs, aromatics, smoke, colors, and flavors to create novel, desirable products that could be traded, create wealth or even distinction at the table. Complex, elaborately flavored salt was actually a thing across traditional cultures of the Afro-Eurasian continuum that we’ve been approaching from the sea. Here are two recipes for elaborately flavored salts, from the Baghdadi Ibn Sayyar’s fabulous tenth-century Iraqi cookbook published by Nawal Nasrallah under the title Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens (Brill 2007):
The salt that unites and divides us
This salt was a dish in and of itself! We imagine the attractively speckled result of these recipes sitting in a beautiful dish, a kind of salt cellar, on the caliph’s table. In medieval and Renascence European culinary culture, salt cellars were elaborate objects set on luxurious tables and containing salt or, perhaps more usually, a wide array of exotic spices; these dishes were themselves part of the aesthetic experience of a lavish meal. Salt could certainly be a tool of distinction, a food that in its many functions and forms divided people by class, wealth, privilege, cosmopolitanism. But the modern Greek proverb tells also a different story. “They ate salt and bread together” is said, and this act expresses the strong bond created between people who go through life’s difficulties together.
As producers of salt, even very barren and otherwise unproductive coasts, become essential to inland civilization. That’s what we see in the delightful Tamil love poem that heads our post and vividly how salt connects the distinct economies and societies of the shore and the inland mountain or plain.
We would like to conclude this post on salt with a philosophical note, borrowed from the Arabic thought: to appreciate the sweet, drinkable water one has to recognize the merits of salty water. The Quranic verse (Q25:53) presents the co-existence of “the two seas” (al-baḥrayn) as a sign of God’s creative power: “And it is he who has made flow the two seas, one sweet and fresh the other salty and bitter, and he has put a barrier between them.” Salt straddles this barrier!
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