Salting the earth

Cities

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, though historical accounts are unclear about what the sowing of salt meant in that process. Various Hittite and Assyrian texts speak of ceremonially strewing salt, minerals, or plants such as weeds, cress, or kudimmu 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 around 1050 BC after quelling a revolt against him, which may have been part of a ritual. At least as early as 1863, various texts 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 in 146 BC, sacking it, and enslaving the survivors; this 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 academic literature in Bertrand Hallward's chapter in the first edition of the Cambridge Ancient History in 1930 and was widely accepted as factual, but there are no ancient sources for it and it is now considered apocryphal. When Pope Boniface VIII destroyed Palestrina in 1299, he ordered that it be plowed and salted, following the old example of Carthage in Africa; his text is not clear as to whether he thought Carthage was salted. Later accounts of other saltings in the destructions of medieval Italian cities, such as Padua by Attila in 452, Milan by Frederick Barbarossa in 1162, and Semifonte by the Florentines in 1202, are now rejected as unhistorical. The English epic poem Siege of Jerusalem from around 1370 recounts that Titus commanded the sowing of salt on the Temple, an episode not found in Josephus's account. In Spain and the Spanish Empire, salt was poured onto the land owned by a convicted traitor after his house was demolished, often one who was executed and his head placed on a picota.