Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [9]
The phoenix-like Cucuteni culture in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, famous for periodically burning their own villages to the ground only to rebuild them again from the ashes, spawned some of the first artisans to specialize in salt making—or at least they were among the first to leave ample evidence of their industry. Shards of pottery used to evaporate brines from a salt spring in the Carpathians date to 6000 BCE, and salt is credited with supporting the growth and expansion of the Cucuteni people. Neolithic settlements with evidence of salt production have been discovered in Thailand, Philippines, Iran, and Egypt.
WHEEL OF FORTUNE
The sale of salt—and its use as currency—is legend. The technical challenges to administering a salt-based economy are less known. Moving around vast amounts of a granular commodity and exchanging it at a more or less fixed rate for another commodity means packing it in barrels or leather sacks, weighing it out for the customer, then packing the measured quantity in barrels or sacks. All of this packing, unpacking, measuring, and repacking is expensive. Drying wet salt in molds in an oven provides standardized, easy-to-handle pucks of salt that can be traded at a standardized price. The queijo de sal (“cheese wheel of salt”) made at the Rio Maior saltworks in Portugal is possibly the last remaining example of this once-common style of currency. Located twenty miles from the sea, Rio Maior is also among the only inland salt farm still active in Europe. Its salt pans are fed by a briny spring that is seven times more saline than the sea. Salt has been made at Rio Maior since time immemorial. In 1177, Pedro d’Aragon and his bride, Sancha Smith, sold a portion of the saltworks at Rio Maior to the Knights Templar, who may have used salt sales to help fund the Third Crusade. In my estimation, the queijo de sal pictured here, a gift from the impassioned Dr. Loïc Ménanteau, an expert in European salt marshes at the University of Nantes, is priceless.
The Phoenicians established the port city of Tyre in 2750 BCE (according to Herodotus), in what is now Lebanon, and from there they built a powerful, decentralized network of culturally linked city-states based on trade. They were a maritime society with legendary seafaring skills, rumored to have made the first crossing of the Atlantic some 2,000 years before Columbus. Saltworks were one of the chief features of their settlements in Lebanon, Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Cyprus, Crete, and Sicily. By 1110 BCE, they had founded Gadir, now Cádiz, in Spain, linking trade operations with Allis Ubbo, now called Lisbon, where Phoenicians may have traded since 1200 BCE. Both settlements boasted saltworks.
Phoenician ships may have spread Saltmaking technologies as far north as England. The great warehouses of Tyre stocked goods from as far east as India, and it is not unlikely that the Phoenicians promoted salt making across the Middle East. Assyrians, Byzantines, Persians, Romans, and Celts all took over Phoenician settlements, many of them becoming strategic saltworks.
The growing importance of salt was not a phenomenon confined to the Mediterranean world. The Chinese were making salt on a large scale for at least six millennia before Christ was born. One technology they developed—the process of using bamboo pipes to move brine from wells to iron pans where it was boiled off—was in continuous use at least since 450 BCE until the twentieth century. Prior to that, earthenware vessels were used. A site on the Ganjing River has known salt production more or less continually from the third millennium BC until modern times. The practice of raising revenue through a salt tribute may have started in the Xia Dynasty (2070 BCE to 1600 BCE). Subsequently, entire dynasties rose and fell as a result of wars fought to control salt production, such as the fighting during the Spring and Autumn Period (770