salting the earth

The tradition & historical record

Salting the earth, or sowing with salt, is the ritual of spreading salt on the sites of cities razed by conquerors. It originated as a curse on re-inhabitation in the ancient Near East and became a well-established folkloric motif in the Middle Ages. The best-known example is the salting of Shechem as narrated in the Biblical Book of Judges 9:45. The supposed salting of Carthage is not supported by historical evidence. ¹

The custom of purifying or consecrating a destroyed city with salt and cursing anyone who dared to rebuild it was widespread in the ancient Near East, but historical accounts are unclear as to what the sowing of salt meant in that process. In the case of Shechem, various commentaries explain it as: ¹

...a covenantal curse, a means of ensuring desolation, a ritual to avert the vengeance of the shades of the slaughtered, a purification of the site preparatory to rebuilding, or a preparation for final destruction under the herem ritual. ¹

Various Hittite and Assyrian texts speak of ceremonially strewing salt, minerals, or plants (weeds, "cress", or kudimmu, which are associated with salt and desolation) over destroyed cities, including Hattusa, Taidu, Arinna, Hunusa, Irridu, and Susa. The Book of Judges (9:45) says that Abimelech, the judge of the Israelites, sowed his own capital, Shechem, with salt, c. 1050 BC, after quelling a revolt against him. This may have been part of a ḥērem ritual (see Salt in the Bible). ¹

At least as early as 1863, various texts have claimed that the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus plowed over and sowed the city of Carthage with salt after defeating it in the Third Punic War (146 BC), sacking it, and enslaving the survivors. The salting was probably modeled on the story of Shechem. Though ancient sources mention symbolically drawing a plow over various cities and salting them, none mention Carthage in particular. The salting story entered the academic literature in Bertrand Hallward's chapter in the first edition of the Cambridge Ancient History (1930), and was widely accepted as factual. However, there are no ancient sources for it and it is now considered apocryphal. ¹

When Pope Boniface VIII destroyed Palestrina in 1299, he ordered that it be plowed "following the old example of Carthage in Africa", and salted. "I have run the plough over it, like the ancient Carthage of Africa, and I have had salt sown upon it..." The text is not clear as to whether he thought Carthage was salted. Later accounts of other saltings in the destructions of medieval Italian cities are now rejected as unhistorical: Padua by Attila (452), perhaps in a parallel between Attila and the ancient Assyrians; Milan by Frederick Barbarossa (1162); and Semifonte by the Florentines (1202). ¹

The English epic poem Siege of Jerusalem (c. 1370) recounts that Titus commanded the sowing of salt on the Temple; this episode is not found in Josephus's account. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Salting the earth”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

salting the earth is ritual of spreading salt on conquered cities to symbolize a curse on their re-inhabitation, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 1 external register, which can be verified through the citation. ²