“And Avimelekh fought against the city, all that day, and he took the city, and slew the people that were in it, and pulled down the city, and sowed it with salt.” This Avimelekh was clearly not a bloke to be trifled with, but my question is about the sowing part. Did anyone really get bags of salt and plow it into the ground just to prove what total conquerors they were? Salt was a rare and valuable commodity for most of history, so this would have been an expensive way to make a symbolic point, no? –Sam, Singapore
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I learned in elementary school that when the Romans sacked Carthage during the final Punic war, they “salted the earth,” so that nothing could ever grow there again. However, here in Vermont we dump literally tons of salt all over the roads every winter in the name of ice control. This salt goes somewhere, washed by the spring rains into the soil by the roadside, eventually into rivers, lakes, and ponds and the water table. Yet every spring Vermont explodes into lush greenery, even right by the side of the road. So how effective is salt as a herbicide? –Mark Z, via e-mail
As for Carthage, we need to take that story with a pinch of salt too. When Scipio sacked Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War in 146 BC, it’s not out of the question that he salted the ground. Salt was readily available at salt works and brine springs all over Italy, and the Romans had conquered Carthaginian salt works in north Africa. However, no ancient account says anything about salting the ground–that twist may have originated with the 19th-century German historian Ferdinand Gregorovius, who mentions it in his History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages. Gregorovius’s contemporary Theodor Mommsen says the Roman senate ordered the site of Carthage to be plowed under, but even that’s debatable. Whatever fearsome measures may have been adopted, they didn’t take; the site was reinhabited within a century and developed into a thriving Roman city.
