Salt: A World History

by Mark Kurlansky

The colorfully dressed salt miners of Hallein were Celts. Celts did not illustrate their culture on temple walls as the Egyptians did; nor did they have chroniclers as the Greeks and Romans did. The guardians of Celtic culture, the Druids, did not leave written records. So most of what we know of them is from Greek and Roman historians

It is a sad fate for a people to be defined for posterity by their enemies. Even the name, Celt, is not from their own Indo-European language but from Greek. Keltoi, the name given to them by Greek historians, among them Herodotus, means “one who lives in hiding or under cover.”

The Romans, finding them less mysterious, called them Galli or Gauls, also coming from a Greek word, used by Egyptians as well, hal, meaning “salt.”

The name of the town that sits on an East German salt bed, Halle, like the Austrian towns of Hallein, Swäbisch Hall, and Hallstatt, has the same root as do both Galicia in northern Spain and Galicia in southern Poland, where the town of Ha...

The Rivers Rhine, Main, Neckar, Ruhr, and Isar are all thought to have be...

The Celts used rivers for trade and conquest. They moved west into France, south into northern Spain, and north into Belgium, named after a Celtic tribe, the Belgae.

Exactly how far in the world they traveled, settled, and traded is not certain. Until the nineteenth century, Western history generally dismissed the Celts as crude and frightening barbarians.

received funding from the curator of the imperial coin collection

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Ramsauer’s meticulous scientific methodology made him a pioneer in the new science of archaeology. In the process, a great deal was learned about the early salt-trading Celts. The Hallstatt Period became the archaeological name for a rich early Iron Age culture, beginning about 700 B.C. and lasting until 450 B.C.

Ramsauer’s dig and the Dürnberg finds showed a society living off of salt mining, secluded on remote and rugged mountains at an altitude of 3,000 feet, and yet trading to the far ends of the continent.

ONLY IN THE 1990s did Westerners become aware of the mummies that had been found in the Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. They had been discovered in and near the Tarim Basin, west of Tibet, east of Samarkand and Tashkent, between China and central Asia along the Silk Road, the principal trade route between the Mediterranean and Beijing.

As with the early Egyptian burials that are 1,000 years older, the corpses had been preserved by the naturally salty soil.

The men wore leggings striped in blue, ochre, and crimson. They appeared to be tall with blond or light brown hair, sometimes red beards, and the women’s hair woven in long blond braids. These unknown people were in appearance notably similar to the large blue-eyed blond Celtic warriors described by the Romans almost two millennia later.

The red-and-blue pinstripes were almost identical to fabrics found in the Dürnberg mine. Textile historian Elizabeth Wayland Barber concluded that even the weave was nearly identical workmanship. Why Celts might have been in the salty desert of Asia many centuries before there were known to be Celts remains a mystery.

When the Romans finally succeeded in imposing their culture on the Celts, Moccus, which means “pig,” was the Celtic name for the god Mercury. The Celts did not mean it unkindly. To the pig-loving Celts, the leg of wild boar was considered the choicest piece of meat and was reserved for warriors.

It is likely that among the Celtic contributions to Western culture are the first salt-cured hams.

Fighting over the ham may be more the Greco-Roman view of Celts than the reality. But the Celts certainly made, traded, and ate hams.

THE EARLY CELTIC salt miners understood their mountains. They realized that horizontal shafts from the mountainside, though a great deal easier to travel and move rock through, would require far more digging to reach the rich salt deposits. Instead they dug at steep angles and skillfully shored up the shafts.

Some historians believe that had the Celts won at Alesia, it would have been the beginning of a united Celtic nation. But the Romans won and subjugated the Celts and wrote their history.

The Roman historian Plutarch estimated that the civilized Romans under Julius Caesar, in his decade-long campaign in Gaul, destroyed 800 towns and villages and enslaved 3 million people.

After the Roman campaigns were over, all that remained of Celtic life were isolated groups on the far Atlantic coasts: northwestern Iberia, the Brittany peninsula, the Cornish tip of England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man.

Roman history is the chronic struggle between the privileged patricians and the disenfranchised plebeians.

“Common salt,” as it has come to be known, was a Roman concept.

They loved the esoteric, such as sow’s vulva and teats, a dish that is frequently mentioned for banquets and which provoked a debate as to whether it should be from a virgin sow or, as Pliny the Elder suggested, one whose first litter was aborted.

Roman government did not maintain a monopoly on salt sales as did the Chinese, but it did not hesitate to control salt prices when it seemed necessary.

On the eve of Emperor Augustus’s decisive naval campaign defeating Mark Anthony and Cleopatra, Augustus garnered public support by distributing free olive oil and salt.

In the fashion of the Chinese emperors, the Roman government declared an artificially high price for salt and put the profits at the disposal of the military. A low price was still maintained in the city of Rome, but elsewhere a charge was added in accordance with the distance from the nearest saltwork. This salt tax system was devised by Marcus Livius, a tribune, a government official representing plebeians.

MOST ITALIAN CITIES were founded proximate to saltworks, starting with Rome in the hills behind the saltworks at the mouth of the Tiber.

The Roman army required salt for its soldiers and for its horses and livestock. At times soldiers were even paid in salt, which was the origin of the word salary and the expression “worth his salt” or “earning his salt.”

the Latin word sal became the French word solde, meaning pay, which is the origin of the word, soldier.

To the Romans, salt was a necessary part of empire building. They developed saltworks throughout their expanded world, establishing them on seashores, marshes, and b...

More than sixty saltworks from the Roman Empire have been identified.

Romans boiled sea salt in pottery, which they broke after a solid salt block had formed inside. Piles of pottery shards mark many ancient Roman sea salt sites throughout the Mediterranean.

burned marsh plants to extract salt from the ashes.

None of these techniques were Roman inventions. Aristotle had mentioned brine spring evaporation in the fourth century B.C. Hippocrates, the fifth-century-B.C. physician, seems to have known about solar-evaporated sea salt.

The Roman genius was administration—not the originality of the project but the scale of the operation.

THE ROMANS SALTED their greens, believing this to counteract the natural bitterness, which is the origin of the word salad, salted.

since salt symbolized the binding of an agreement, the absence of a saltcellar on a banquet table would have been interpreted as an unfriendly act and reason for suspicion.

Most of the salt consumed by Romans was already in their food when they bought it at the market. Salt was even added to wine in a spicy mixture called dejrutum, which, in the absence of bottling corks, was used to preserve the wine.

The recipes for many of the French and Italian sausages of today date from Roman times.

According to Strabo, the well-traveled first-century-B.C. Greek historian, the most prized ham in Rome came from the forests of Burgundy.

Cato, like many Romans, was a ham enthusiast.

Cato was called Marcus Porcius. Porky Marcus’s recipe for mothproof ham was an attempt to produce a Westphalia-type product.

OLIVES, PRESERVED IN salt, along with the older idea, crushed into oil, were staples of the Roman diet and a basic food of the working class. Patricians ate olives at the beginning of a meal. For plebeians, they were the meal.

Harvesting olives requires so much care that in ancient times it was believed that conditions were only auspicious for a successful harvest during the last quarter moon of each month.

FISH WAS THE centerpiece of Roman cuisine. When salted, it was also at the heart of Roman commerce.

Sicily was known as the “breadbasket of Rome” for its grain. But it also had valuable fisheries. Catching, salt curing, and selling fish was the major activity of the entire Sicilian coastline, and the most famous fish throughout the Mediterranean was the salted bluefin tuna.

Normally when a tuna was caught, the choice upper body parts were eaten fresh, and the drier tail meat was reserved for salting.

Salsamentum, from sal, salt, was the Roman word for salted products. The most commercially important salsamentum was salt fish.

After the producers made all of these salsamenta, the scraps—the innards, the gills, and the tails—were used to make sauce. Roman writings mention four classes of sauce: garum, liquamen, allec, and muria. The exact meaning of these terms has been lost. Allec may have been the leftover sludge after the sauce was strained. Garum and liquamen ended up being generic terms for fermented fish sauce.