While local producers thrived, however, Rome’s distant hinterlands suffered: by the third century AD, the soils of North Africa were exhausted, and observers wrote despairingly of the white, caked earth, a sure sign of fatal salinisation.34 By relentlessly extracting its nutrients from distant lands, Rome effectively ate itself to death, yet it was far from the first or last great civilisation to do so. Indeed, the pattern has been remarkably consistent. The Sumerians, whose genius for irrigation wasn’t matched by an equal talent for drainage, met a similar fate.35 The Greeks’ obsession with
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