Salt: A World History

by Mark Kurlansky

unlike the mythical Emperor Yao, Li Bing’s existence is well documented. His most extraordinary accomplishment was the building of the first dam, which still functions in modernized form. At a place called Dujiangyan, he divided the Minjiang River, a tributary of the Yangtze. The diverted water goes into a series of spillways and channels that can be opened to irrigate in times of droughts and closed in times of flooding. He had three stone figures of men placed in the water as gauges. If their feet were visible, this signaled drought conditions and the dam’s gates were opened to let in water. If their shoulders were submerged, floodwaters had risen too high and the dam’s gates were closed.

Li Bing made a very simple but pivotal discovery. By his time, Sichuan had long been a salt-producing area. Salt is known to have been made in Sichuan as early as 3000 B.C. But it was Li Bing who found that the natural brine, from which the salt was made, did not originate in the pools where it was found but seeped up from underground.

sometimes the people who dug the wells would inexplicably become weak, get sick, lie down, and die. Occasionally, a tremendous explosion would kill an entire crew or flames spit out from the bore holes.

By A.D. 100, the well workers, understanding that the disturbances were caused by an invisible substance, found the holes where it came out of the ground, lit them, and started placing pots close by. They could cook with it. Soon they learned to insulate bamboo tubes with mud and brine and pipe the invisible force to boiling houses.

Salt makers learned to drill and shore up a narrow shaft, which allowed them to go deeper. They extracted the brine by means of a long bamboo tube which fit down the shaft. At the bottom of the tube was a leather valve. The weight of the water would force the valve shut while the long tube was hauled out. Then the tube was suspended over a tank, where a poke from a stick would open the valve and release the brine into the tank. The tank was connected to bamboo piping that led to the boiling house. Other bamboo pipes, planted just below the wellhead to capture escaping gas, also went to the boiling house.

From the piping at Sichuan brine works, Chinese throughout the country learned to build irrigation and plumbing systems. Farms, villages, and even houses were built with bamboo plumbing. By the Middle Ages, the time of the Norman conquest of England, Su Dongpo, a bureaucrat born in Sichuan, was building sophisticated bamboo urban plumbing.

The pipes were laid over the landscape to use gravity wherever possible, rising and falling like a roller coaster, with loops to create long downhill runs.

At the time of Harold’s death, the Chinese were using gunpowder, which was one of the first major industrial applications for salt.

The ancient character for salt, yan, is a pictograph in three parts. The lower part shows tools, the upper left is an imperial official, and the upper right is brine. So the very character by which the word salt was written depicted the state’s control of its manufacture.

The legalists insisted that earthly institutions effectively wielding power were what guaranteed a state’s survival. One of the leading legalists was a man named Shang, who advised the Qin (pronounced CHIN) state. Shang said that respect for elders and tradition should not interfere with reforming, clearing out inefficient institutions and replacing them with more effective and pragmatic programs.

The conclusion of the Guanzi is that “salt has the singularly important power to maintain the basic economy of our state.”

The proposals in the Guanzi, which became Qi policy, now became the policy of the Qin and the emperor of China. The Qin dynasty was marked by the legalists’ tendency for huge public works and harsh laws. A price-fixing monopoly on salt and iron kept prices for both commodities excessively high. It is the first known instance in history of a state-controlled monopoly of a vital commodity.

The Chinese world had expanded much farther than that of the Romans. Rome had an empire by conquest, was at the zenith of its power as well, but was menaced by the Gauls and Germanic tribes and even more threatened by internal civil wars.

The central subject was to be the state monopolies on iron and salt. But what emerged was a contest between Confucianism and legalism over the responsibilities of good government—an expansive debate on the duties of government, state profit versus private initiative, the logic and limits of military spending, the rights and limits of government to interfere in the economy.

Once superiors and inferiors are competing for profit, the state will be in danger.”

In 44 B.C., the next emperor, Yuandi, abolished them. Three years later, with the treasury emptied by a third successful western expedition to Sogdiana in Turkistan, he reestablished the monopolies. They continued to be abolished and reestablished regularly according to budgetary needs, usually related to military activities.

the other great moral and political questions of the great debate on salt and iron—the need for profits, the rights and obligations of nobility, aid to the poor, the importance of a balanced budget, the appropriate tax burden, the risk of anarchy, and the dividing line between rule of law and tyranny—have all remained unresolved issues.

Every important period in ancient Egyptian history produced tombs containing detailed information about food.

He wrote that an inscription on one wall asserted that during twenty years of construction, the builders supplied the workers with radishes, onions, and garlic worth 1,600 talents of silver, which in contemporary dollars would be about $2 million.

Like the Sichuan Chinese, the Egyptians had an appreciation for vegetables preserved in brine or salt. “There is no better food than salted vegetables” are words written on an ancient papyrus.

The ancient Egyptians may have been the first to cure meat and fish with salt. The earliest Chinese record of preserving fish in salt dates from around 2000 B.C. Salted fish and birds have been found in Egyptian tombs from considerably earlier.

Proteins unwind when exposed to heat, and they do the same when exposed to salt. So salting has an effect resembling cooking.

Those narrow fertile strips on either bank of the Nile were their principal source of food, and a dry year in which the Nile failed to flood could be disastrous. To be prepared, Egyptians put up food in every way they could, including stockpiling grain in huge silos.

Were it not for their aversion to pigs, the Egyptians would probably have invented ham, for they salt-cured meat and knew how to domesticate the pig. But Egyptian religious leadership pronounced pigs carriers of leprosy, made pig farmers social outcasts, and never depicted the animal on the walls of tombs.

the Egyptians did succeed in domesticating fowl—ducks, geese, quail, pigeon, and pelican. Ancient walls show fowl being splayed, salted, and put into large earthen jars.

They also dried, salted, and pressed the eggs of mullet, creating another of the great Mediterranean foods known in Italian as bottarga.

Making olives and making olive oil are at cross purposes, since a good eating olive is low in oil content.

THE EGYPTIANS MADE salt by evaporating seawater in the Nile Delta. They also may have procured some salt from Mediterranean trade. They clearly obtained salt from African trade, especially from Libya and Ethiopia. But they also had their own desert of dried salt lakes and salt deposits.

Long before seventeenth- and eighteenth-century chemists began identifying and naming the elements of different salts, ancient alchemists, healers, and cooks were aware that different salts existed, with different tastes and chemical properties that made them suitable for different tasks.

The Egyptians found a salt that, though they could not have expressed it in these terms, is a mixture of sodium bicarbonate and sodium carbonate with a small amount of sodium chloride.

The spot was called Natrun, and they named the salt netjry, or natron, after the wadi. Natron is found in “white” and “red,” though white natron is usually gray and red natron is pink.

Investigators argue about whether sodium chloride was used in mummification. It is difficult to know, since natron contains a small amount of sodium chloride that leaves traces of common salt in all mummies.

In the nineteenth century, when mummies from Saqqara and Thebes were taken from tombs and brought to Cairo, they were taxed as salted fish before being permitted entry to the city.

In the ancient world, the Egyptians were leading exporters of raw foods such as wheat and lentils. Although salt was a valuable commodity for trade, it was bulky. By making a product with the salt, a value was added per pound, and unlike fresh food, salt fish, well handled, would not spoil.

the Phoenicians used a Semitic forerunner of ancient Hebrew, the earliest traces of which were found in the Sinai from 1400 B.C., which had only twenty-two characters, each representing a particular sound. It was the simplicity of this alphabet as much as their commercial prowess that opened up trade in the ancient Mediterranean.

The Arabs called such a saltworks a sebkha, and on a modern map of North Africa, from the Egyptian-Libyan border to the Algerian-Moroccan line, from Sabkaht Shunayn to Sebkha de Tindouf, sebkhas are still clearly labeled.

Fezzan producers had moved beyond simply scraping the sebkhas. The crust was boiled until fairly pure crystals had been separated, and they were then molded into three-foot-high white tapered cylinders. Traders then carried these oddly phallic objects, carefully wrapped in straw mats, by caravan across the desert.

Because a profitable salt shipment is bulky and heavy, accessible transportation has always been the essential ingredient in salt trade.

Trans-Saharan commerce existed in ancient times, but crossings were rare events until the third century A.D., when the camel replaced the horse. The camel was a native of North America, though it became extinct there two million years ago.

Between the domestication of the camel and its use in the Sahara, several millennia passed. But once the domestic camel made its Sahara debut, its use spread quickly.

Taghaza is imagined as a sparkling white city, but it was swept by Saharan sands, and the pockmarked salt turned a dingy gray. Though its salt construction impressed later travelers, salt blocks were the only material available for building, and Taghaza was probably a miserable work camp,

In ancient Taghaza, salt was quarried from the near surface in 200-pound blocks loaded on camels, one block on each side. The powerful animals carried them 500 miles to Timbuktu, a trading center because of its location on the northernmost crook of the Niger River, which connects most of West Africa. In Timbuktu, the goods of North Africa, the Sahara, and West Africa were exchanged, and the wealth from trade built a cultural center.

In the gold-producing regions of West Africa, a pile of gold would be set out, and a salt merchant would counter with a pile of salt, each side altering their piles until an agreement was reached. No words were exchanged during this process, which might take days. The salt merchants often arrived at night to adjust their piles and leave unseen. They were extremely secretive, not wanting to reveal the location of their deposits.

Generally, the richer Africans used salt with higher sodium chloride content, and natron was the salt of the poor. In West Africa white natron was used for bean cakes of millet or sorghum, called kunu.

In Timbuktu, which was a center of not only the salt trade but the tobacco trade, a mixture of tobacco and natron was chewed.

Africans have maintained a tradition of a wide variety of different salts for different dishes, but they always treat any salt as a valuable substance that must not be wasted.

Africans became so accustomed to their impure salts, with specific tasks found for each blend, that when Europeans in the age of colonialism introduced pure sodium chloride, Africans mixed it with other salts to make salt compounds more to their liking.

near the Austrian town of Hallein, a name which means “saltwork,” near Salzburg, which means “salt town.”

In 1616, a similar body had been found in nearby Hallstatt, which also means “salt town.”

Three prehistoric miners have been found, trapped in their dark ancient work sites, and many tools, leather shoes, clothes in their original bright colors—the oldest color-preserved European textiles ever found—leather sacks for hauling rock salt on their backs, torches made of pine sticks bundled together and dipped in resin, and a horn possibly used to warn of cave-ins—all well preserved in salt.