The Boring Truth about the Salting of Carthage - it isn't what you think
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- Опубліковано 16 кві 2024
- After the fall of Carthage in the Third Punic War, in 146 BC, it is popularly believed that the Romans salted the earth around the city, so that nothing would ever grow there again. This is, however, not the case. So what really happened?
“To be taken with a pinch of salt” 😂
😂
😂
My history lessons made it sound like Carthage became a desolate landscape. But then I read The Confessions of Saint Augustine and learned that it was still a major city by 300 A.D. It just no longer had the power that it once had.
The Carthage of that time was a different city with no continuity. The Romans had initially opposed rebuilding Carthage in any form but about 100 years later it was refounded by Julius Ceasar as a Roman colony. Its inhabitants would have been immigrants from Rome (perhaps discharged veterans) not the descendants of the original Carthaginians. That's the city that Augustine lived in.
The Romans rebuilt Carthage as a colony about a hundred years after they destroyed it. That would have been impossible had they actually sterilized the surrounding hinterland as some people still believe for some reason.
It became a Roman colony under Julius Caesar. If it had been salted, nothing would grow.
@@monadsingleton9324 A century is a long time for nature to recover from man's puny efforts.
Apart from that, the sheer cost of salting in any meaningful way would have been a non-starter.
Tokyo still exists despite most of the houses being burned in WWII but is now an even larger city now than it was then, it is simply now subordinate to America rather than the center of its own empire.
One of my favorite Simpsons exchanges is when Homer steals all of Flanders's flowers from his garden to decorate a float. Flanders says something like "I don't mind that you took all my flowers to decorate your float, but did you have to salt the earth as well?"
"hehe, yeah..."
Maybe salting the Earth was some sort of ritual to show that Carthage was indeed destroyed.
Yeah there is no way Rome was spending enough Salt (valuable material, root word for salary) to fully salt the earth.
Rome had a ritual plot of land, a few meters square that they would stab with spears when declaring war and as a people were fiercely believing of Curses.
The Romans likely did something ritualistic in the heart of Carthage, possibly some temple breaking, and walked off with every bit of gold and silver they could carry out of the city of merchants
My thoughts exactly. After all, it would have been a pointless exercise after killing almost everyone and selling what was left into slavery, not to mention the huge cost of doing such a thing.
Not impossible, but I’m not a big fan of «I don’t know what this is so I guess it has ritual significance” cop out.
@@KTroyborg it isn’t a cop out. Pre modern people did not have the materialist view of the world that most contemporary Westerners hold. Ritual and spiritual was everywhere, at all times.
The region around Carthage eventually became an important wheat-growing region, supplying the entire empire, didn’t it? The facts that the credulous mediaevals came up with the idea, and that the idea was brought back at a time when nationalism was on the rise in Europe, suggest a complete fiction, although an inestimable amount of sources keep on getting lost, so who knows? Analysis of a few well chosen soil samples ought to be instructive, just in case the mediaevals were accidentally right. 😊
Also Roman soldiers were paid at least in part in salt, weren’t they?-according to some tradition-at some point in their history . . .
Roman soldiers, looking at millions of tonnes of salt: You want us to what
If they did salt the earth it's pretty safe to say they just abused existing irrigation systems with sea water.
North Africa, specifically the area around coastal Tunisia was a major breadbasket of Imperial Rome, so even before I looked further into it, I always assumed the salting the earth was just an exegeration to show the destuctivness of the Roman sack.
Or a symbolic act of humiliating a defeated enemy. Salting one field as a show of final victory.
@@BoredSquirell It was like when the defeated Roman soldiers had to one by one walk under a yoke to symbolize their humiliation and defeat after they had been defeated by the Samnites - one of the most dangerous tribes in south Italy that opposed Rome.
Also, salt was extremely valuable and surprisingly hard to come by. While you could, I guess, water the land with seawater, actually just a huge amount of salt and sowing it around would be impossibly expensive and self defeating.
@@Oldsmobile69
It wasn't extremely valuable. It was very important to all of human life, meaning it was always high in demand and you always could make money with it, but it wasn't some sort of inaffordable luxury. Everyone had to be able to afford it after all.
If you want to compare it to anything, think oil. People can get very rich producing it, but not because oil itself is an impossibly expensive commodity, but because everyone has to use it all the time.
@@kaloarepo288 Caudine Forks ! But it wasn't S Italy ? Mid Italy me thinks
Well for one thing they wouldn't have wasted the salt, salt was an important commodity. the Romans rebuilt Carthage and it was part of their empire for centuries after that, so salting the earth so nothing would grow there again would have been really dumb.
Well said.
That's what i was thinking: given the amount of salt that would have been needed and how expensive it was, it seems like an unlikely exercise.
There was an awful lot of it in the sea and Carthage is a port. Salt can be very valuable in areas far inland without local deposits
@@virgilxavier1 But you still need to process the seawater to extract the salt.
Italy is hardly "far inland", but it was still so valued by the Romans, that their army received part of their pay in salt (believed to be the root of the word "salary"). Speaking of processing, the desire for salt in Rome was so great that they built roads specifically to transport it: the Via Salaria was built to move salt from the pans at the mouth of the Tiber into the city.
I was about to say, it seems like if you want to conquer a city in modern times, you would want to keep the infrastructure and agricultural capacity intact as much as possible, just force them to pay taxes to you and use what they built to support your people. Apparently the Romans had the same idea...
Salt was also extremely expensive. Soldiers were often paid with bags of salt. Perhaps the Romans pumped seawater and flooded the land, which dried up, leaving a layer of salt behind
An interesting tidbit: here in Ireland we have something very similar to salting the earth but it works in reverse for us. We plough bog land with crushed lime to make it mimic arable soil. It goes from swampy marsh that can only sustain peat moss, reeds, and some root vegetables and forageable shrubs into actually usable farmland you can grow a range of edible crops in.
Nowadays peat bogs are a valuable carbon sink, the North European rainforest. Does this use of marshland respect that?
@@thumper8684 I think growing food for his family trumps empty middle-class virtue signaling.
@@thumper8684 not starving takes priority over the environment. Go guilt trip someone that cares.
this is absolutely correct there are even Roman sources that testify to just this kind of treatment (Pliny on the Pontine marshes) to provide somewhat fertile soil for arable crops. This would make sense for Carthage which lies on a promontory and was indeed surrounded by salt marsh. Rome actually reoccupied Carthage ater extensive changes to the city which was essentially buried, levelled over and the new city was built on the mound. Would be curious if later sources had conflated Roman sources referring to the reclamation of land for farming in Carthage with the desire to destroy it based on Biblical stories.
I seen one of the bogs when I went to Ireland, I didn’t know you guys could turn them into farmland. That’s really cool
The equivalent phrase to salting the earth now would be to glass them. It was probably a turn of phrase.
But glassing isn't just a term. It comes from heating a place up enough that it turns sand to glass.
@@iamcurious9541why do you think what you just said is in any way contradictory to the person you're responding to?
i find it strange and almost suspicious that such a large percentage of UA-cam response comments are technically coherent yet utterly pointless
Confused time traveller with AR-15 and platoon of marines: We're here for the peppering of Baalbek.
those marines bring people who can make more ammunition too, molds for bullets and stuff?
@@carlosrivas1629 I don't know man, why don't you go check in the Harry Turtledove section, I'll be over here with the point, which is a joke dawg
@@sdhflkjshdfskdhfskljdhf582 good because it would be stupid. those marines were better off hand to hand or you know, thier swords. without guns, it all manpower!
@@carlosrivas1629 If you're going to be a realism pedant about such a ridiculous situation in the first place, 'Those Marines should beat the Romans... with swords!' is a pretty absurd tack to take. I'm sure the Marines who saw that one recruiting commercial in the 90s where the dude has a magic sword are really going to win in a mass melee against... Romans. Because of a slight advantage in size from diet and uh, the American spirit I guess.
@@sdhflkjshdfskdhfskljdhf582 well its not perfect but without guns it was all manpower.
My history professor pushes that the salting of Carthage did happen, but to only a minor plot of land. He talks about how when Rome declares war on others they throw a spear into their land. But as Rome got bigger, it took longer to go to the border to throw the spear. So Rome “gave” a plot of land (think of a small section of a garden or lawn) to the enemy so they could throw the spear into it to declare war. My history professor believes that they salted that little plot in Rome for symbolism. A lot cheaper then salting the actual land of Carthage
I never thought about it and took it for granted. But it is true, salt would have been too expensive for making the land infertile. Thank you for this video!
I always presumed that's what the phrase meant. "Making the area virtually uninhabitable on a scale required for civilization"
(interesting video tho, as always, to be clear)
*LOL. Setting aside the fact the reports of Carthage being salted didn't emerge until the mid-Nineteenth Century, the whole reason why Rome went to war with Carthage for the third - and final - time was to gain control of the rich, agricultural hinterlands around the city. This fertile farmland was the real basis for Carthaginian greatness, the key to its recovery after Carthage lost her empire at the end of the Second Punic War. The Romans taking control of this cornucopia just to turn around and sterilize it makes absolutely no sense, whatsoever.*
A bold statement
Most likely was that the romans used saltwater to salt the soil around the immediate area of Carthage as a symbolic act
Maybe it meant just pissing on it then? That would surely rate as a symbolic act. 🤔
Actually, most likely was that it never happened.
1. Motive: They already destroyed the city and its inhabitants. The rich land is yours to profit from. What would be the point of ruining it? 2. Execution: Where would they get the vast amount of expensive salt necessary to do so? 3. History: The city, soon rebuilt by Romans, continued to be agriculturally productive after the conquest. 4. Record: There is no actual record of salting the land.
"Soon" ? The city is rebuilt more than 100 years later when nothing of Carthagians left. Yes, that was a genocide!
Have any archaeologists tested the soil around old Carthage?
actually that likely would have come up at some point given we know where old carthage is, Roman Carthage was built on its foundations, not to mention Tunis today still contains much of both sites
Twenty-one centuries would alter the salt content in the soil. Rainwater and run-off would remove enough salts so that it seemed within normal ranges.
Archeology could not determine a man-made salting.
Salt cover does not take very long to drain out of the soil. Even when salting were even attempted which was actually pretty rare it would only take a few decades for the ground to become fertile again.
Its been 2000 years
@@denzelhobbs9982 Agreed. The most effective, and still probably unfeasible idea, would be to divert a portion of the ocean to their cropland. Or perhaps a river draining into the ocean, leaving a portion covered in salts through evaporation. But twenty hundred years would alter that chemical signature, and without a specific account of such diversion with a specific point, it's artificial nature would be impossible to prove.
@@commiemeth Roman Carthage became the second or third largest cities in the western Roman empire and continued during the Vandal and Byzantine periods - it was destroyed by the Arabs who replaced it with Tunis etc
Pronunciation note: you'd do a better job pronouncing Shechem if you pretended it's written as "Shkhem".
The "CH" in "Shechem" is not pronounced as it is in "Change". It's כ, which is pronounced in this context very close to the common Modern Hebrew Pronunciation of ח (the "incorrect" one). If you've ever heard an Israeli (or someone imitating one) say Hanukka, you'll know the sound I mean.
As for the first "E" in "ShEchem", the common modern pronunciation doesn't commonly include it, and there's an argument over the original pronunciation, so "Shekhem" and "Shkhem" would both be fine - but "Shkhem" would be more recognizable to most native speakers.
As always, thanks for the video!
You learn something new every day. Thanks.
Seems Romans did a pretty good job leveling Carthage without the salt. Can't imagine they'd waste that much money anyway, salt was pretty expensive stuff those days.
3:15 Future generations will remember the 19th century as the golden age of historical mendacity, followed closely by the 18th.
You think our century is without extreme faults or delusions?
@@Dogman262 Undoubtedly many, but less historical than political.
@@lempereurcremeux3493hey buddy… politics and history… Is connected.
@@treheron I'm sure you can inject the central political squabbles of our time into Roman history if you wish to, but I doubt most people care about whether Elagabalus was really trans or Trajan was secretly Christian. They care about politics in the here and now, not in the distant past.
@@lempereurcremeux3493 well I just think you fail to take into account that people these days are quite literally joking about spreading false information on the internet, as well as politicians (cough cough Biden.) saying the economy is doing great, when we all are feeling our pockets emptying day by day due to inflation.
Considering that salt was a very valuable resource at the time, the claim is laughable from the beginning. In history class as a child though, I surely believed it.
there is also the idea of salt having a purifying role and Carthage being in need of such action
It's not boring. It's fascinating!
Thank you! Another boring truth: the Carthaginian "genocide" didn't happen. The Romans killed or enslaved the city's inhabitants, yes. But that was the usual fate of a city that forced a costly siege at that time (although they definitely did it with prejudice).
But the Carthaginians' Punic identity, language and culture was spread right across the Western Mediterranean, and we know it survived. Punic was still the common tongue around the city in St Augustine's time (5th century AD).
The supposed genocide is just a sensationalist and pervasive historical trope. It's like claiming all Romans were wiped out when Gaiseric or Alaric sacked the city or the Sicilian Greeks disappeared with Syracuse's fall - it ignores centuries of empire, colonization, and the simple fact that cities need hinterlands. If the Romans really wanted to expunge Carthage from the record, why didn't they rename it when they rebuilt it?
"Why didn't they rename it after they rebuilt it?" They did, originally they called the new city "Colonia Junonia" but it failed and Caesar rebuilt Carthage ontop of the original site.
As for the genocide, it absolutely was a genocide and was brutal even for the time. The population was systematically enslaved or slaughtered with not even the religious buildings left untouched with the Temple of Eshmun being destroyed in the ending phase. That is textbook genocide. Even if it was "common for the time" it's genocide.
The Romans didn't care what the remaining Punic cities did so long as they weren't allied to Carthage, otherwise they were also destroyed (like Bizerte).
@@hyperion3145 "The Romans didn't care what the remaining Punic cities did so long as they weren't allied to Carthage" So it wasn't genocide then. If it was they would have targeted all of those cities. Clearly they hated Carthage and Carthage alone. Perhaps genocide carries too much modern baggage, because it simply doesn't apply here.
@@NoobTamer I mean, although the term genocide gets used with some inflation recently, the name still fits here: It was done to extinguish a certain populace (the portion of Punic culture bound to Carthage). If say the people A annihilated any member of people B in a certain, bounded region, that is technically still a genocide. I mean, even the Nazis were not able to actually genocide all the jews, those in the US or Argentina were clearly out of their reach - and it still was a genocide. Similar to the Hutu/Tutsi genocide in Rwanda - both peoples are also present in neighbouring countries and were fairly unaffected there. Only the term genocide was to a certain degree just ... normal .. back then. Everybody did it, if only on a more local scale...
@@LarthV sure - but the Carthaginian experience gets turned up to apocalypse level: from salting the earth of the city, to trying to wipe out any trace of them, their culture or even memory, and this gets repeated in a lot of otherwise credible circles.And it creates a lot of windows for pseudo-historians too (the lost great civilization etc.)
@@blarni9034 No objection there. It is in fact very often attributed to all kids of historical events, often for watever current personal, monetary or political agenda - Anglo Saxons coming to Post Roman Britain or Muslim conquest of Iberia come to mind. A change in language or material culture becomes extinguishing any person that was part of the previous culture. *sigh* Even in antiquity, people were able to learn different languages or different pottery when it was advantageous *sigh*.
Carthage: "Hi-diddily-ho neighbor! I couldn't help but notice you picked all of my empire."
Romer:"Cant have and empire without an empire."
Carthage:"True enough, but did you have to salt the earth so nothing will ever grow again?"
Romer:'Yeah."
(NOTE: Carthage's wheat fields were fine in the next episode, to be Romer's breadbasket, but Hannibal died on the way to his home planet).
I always wondered where Roman got all the salt that would have been required to actually salt the land with salt. I mean, just think about how much salt would have been required and the logistics of getting it there and spreading it out over a HUGE area.
My thought was that the Romans could have used sea water to irrigate the land. Romans had the know-how to do something like that and certainly the hatred of Carthage to do something like that. Nonetheless, it probably didn't happen.
@@gerardmonsen1267 I thought about that, but the sheer work involved with moving enough sea water up out of the ocean just to do this would have been insane.
Also, later on, the area around Carthage was a huge source of grain for Rome.
Just connect the irrigation and fresh water system of the city to the mediterran sea(by digging channels, destroyi g valves and siels)
@@raimohoft1236 But you still have to bring the sea water UP quite a bit to do that, and that would take A LOT of work.
Maybe breaking down sea walls and/or pumping sea water into agricultural fields is a more cost effective way to salt the earth.
I think we are way overthinking it in our modern mind. Carthage was conquered and the people enslaved, salting the earth could have been more of a symbolic gesture that did not damage the soil for more than a few decades or a century. And here we are 2200 years later, doubt any trace of the salting is left.
they probably salted like the top flowers in the main temple as a symbolic gesture and a long game of telephone later we got were we are
That "probably" is rather bold due to the lack of sources.
Sounds interesting to me!
Relating to the older bronze age civilisations, where would they get enough salt to render a significant amount of land infertile?
Nowhere. It washes out easily with the next rainfall. You would need tons and tons of salt to achieve even a temporary effect. Just not worth the effort. It's absolutely enough to salt the garden of the main city temple or the like...
HC, a question about the Peloponnesian war. I have never heard about a Spartan attempt at attacking Athena's walls directly at any point during the war, they've roamed and pillaged the countryside just outside the walls. Have there actually been none or I am not aware of it? I know Phillip of Macedon had siege weapons, and that is not chronologically far apart and there were siege weapons in other cultures much earlier then that so this question itches me in a wrong way
Maybe if I had paid more attention in school I could have answered your question.
Siege warfare wasnt a big thing in greece. The terrain wasnt really suited to wheeling up huge battering rams etc.
It was FAR easier to starve them out.
t@@sugarnads They did practice siege warfare thought. And much of the Athenian plateau is actually pretty flat in many areas. The Spartans just understood that braking through the long walks, wouldn't result in a victory necessarily. Simply because Athens and Piraeus would still be intact. And yes they would have severed the connection between the port and the mainland, but I doubt that the casualties that the Spartans couldn't replace, worth the risk of undertaking such a task. Add to that, that siege engines, catapults etc. were usually made on site and required time to do so. And had to be left behind in a retreat. I hope I answered your question.
i've wondered about this salting because another factoid i've heard is that salt was so valuable people were paid with it, so it seems like a very expensive activity?
would the latter method...the making of the ground more hospitable to weeds have also required tons of salt though?
Total legend. Salt was always cheap. Nobody was ever paid in salt.
Wow. The harbor back in the day really looks like the Great Harbor Ship of Bentus!
I always thought they just screwed up some fields to make a point. Water them with sea water, maybe even a canal or two (romans liked them) and done, I'd imagine.
Or that it might be a metaphor for "we littered the place with dead bodies" (because soldiers where paid with salt and their name basically means salt boy^^) or just a metaphor for ruining the place, because they might as well just salt the place up, and it wouldn't have made a difference.
"obliterated" vs "conquered and returned to nature as if it never existed" seems like the same thing to me
4:13 It looked better in 3 BC. They really should restore the area. Putin a museum and other culture facility, plus top notch resulraunts and cafes. It would create lots of jobs, bring people to the area etc. Hire me Tunisia, I'll take care of it.
It comes from the same bag as the story of soldiers in besieged castles throwing boiling oil at attackers. Considering how valuable salt and oil were... I don't think so.
And wasn’t salt at the time extremely valuable? Would they want to use so much for this somewhat abstract purpose?
I would have liked you to mention the value of salt as a commodity. Ive heard that aalt was extremely valuable in the ancient world
I salted my backyard with water softner salt I bought from Home Depot.
Weeds didn't care.
I dud a calculation with my son and friends about how much human effort would be required to truly "salt the earth" using sea water.. even if the entire Roman army spent a year doing nothing else, they wouldn't have made much impact!..I.e. you woukd need around 10-100 million litres of sea water per hectare to do it properly depending on rainfall levels. So a legion 10,000 strong carrying 150 litres of sea water each a day would manage to do a hectare in 1 year!
Salting could come from intensive cereal agriculture at that latitude. Deep rooted plants keep the water table down. When the deep rooted plants are ripped up, the water table to rises, leaving salt on the surface of the productive ground.
I got added to the mythos as symbolism, it's complete destruction but also because Carthage became great because of it's food exports before it was force to relly on Silver from Spain after the First Punic war.
I have all notifications from you on.
I always thought this was odd, considering the region would become an important source of grain and food for Rome later.
There are also claims that William The Conqueror also 'salted' virtually the whole area of the northern most parts of England during his infamous 'Harrying of the North'. But I've always wondered if that would really have been feasible, even considering that there are still until this very day salt works not far in places like Nantwich, etc. Seems a ridiculous amount of 'man hours' would be needed to be able to do such a thing, even today.
I once had to deal with weeds growing on the edges of my driveway and decided to use this method. Using bags of pool salt I applied so much that it sat on the ground like snow. The weeds came back within 3 months like nothing ever happened! It was no more effective than cheap weed killer. Which is probably why you never hear of gardeners using salt to kill weeds.
Interesting point at the end, I would’ve thought that there could’ve been some sort of ritual where salt was cast into a single furrow. Thereby symbolically destroying the city.
Kinda like the Columna Bellica
Thank you for your boring story.
It's a thing that was done in ancient times for various reasons but often it was because the place had been a dedicated site for demon-god worship and human sacrifices.
Given how rare and expensive salt was during the era, it seems unlikely anyone truly salted fields. It would be expensive and likely not practical. I agree they likely used something else.
For anyone listening, I suggest giving Dan Carlin's "Punic Nightmares" series a chance. It covers this event in detail.
Wasn't salt used as a partial pay to Roman soldiers? (the word salary comes from salt) Not sure it would make sense to use it for the purpose of killing the soil.
It could also have been a ritualistic thing to do. The famous Roman pomerium was laid out by Romulus with a plow according the legends. Perhaps by plowing and salting perimeter around the city it was symbolizing the final conquest of Carthage
yea its from a 1848 book. the salting. or 1824?28?
"Yeah", I believe. "Yea" is the opposite of "nay".
That last part about the simple logistics of getting enough salt to make the whole area desolate is what I asked my teacher long ago. And she just said "whatever, it happened." But the other big red flag to me is, how far did they supposedly salt the Earth? I mean, what if it was just the surrounding area? Nothing is stopping the people of Carthage just farming a couple miles away. Or importing food from one of their many colonies.
I also feel like there could have been a way to "salt the Earth" by letting sea water flood the land. But again, why go to all that effort after you've just conquered something? The Romans could just use it themselves. And they did.
It makes more sense that someone might say the land was reduced to ash. Everything was burned and the land was blackened.
We know that climate in north afica has been changing to a more arid scene in the last few thousand years, a consequence of this is the increase of the salinity of lakes, their evaporation and the formation of the sabkhas, the sality of bodies of water ranges from fresh water in the north to brine/salt flats in the south (chottt jrid), my hypothesis is that climate change is what changed the salinity due to reduced precipitation. We are observing the same thing today with modern climate change.
Even though it seems to not have happened, I think the most powerful aspect of salting the earth is that though Rome could have benefited from using the fertile north African land, causing harm to the Carthaginians remnant, where they dwelled, or their memory was so important that Rome was willing to harm itself.
Considering how expensive salt was throughout antiquity, the story makes sense as a way of saying the Romans were so ruthless in their ending of Carthage that they 'spared no expense'.
Well, thanks for ruining the memes!
Perhaps Rome had salted soils used for gardens of the city rather than vast farm land in the region. The city might have been too large to destroy all the structures so after the defeat they simply spoiled the smaller gardens inside the city to keep people away from immediate re-settlement and over time Rome had build up local administration and authority over the area. You can see this today when a military takes over an area they may do things to prevent civilians from getting back in to some area by destroying access roads or paths, water and infrastructure overall.
May not be factual, but it's still decent metaphor to get across just how determined the Romans were to not only defeat Carthage, but wipe them off the face of the earth. The idea that they would resort to such an extreme measure just to ensure the city itself could never come back again certainly sounds like something they'd do if it were possible. What we do know is that the area was completely depopulated and a new city wouldn't arise in its place until roman settlers started rebuilding there a century later.
It is a metaphore ....
For the Romans salt was hard to come up with and expensive. Thus it is knowable in advance that any salting of the soil would be essentially symbolic. Not enough to do any sustained damage. If the available water was enough to farm, then no way they could put down enough salt on even a limited acreage to do permanent damage.
I think it was actually done on a ceremonial basis on a small plot.
One of the first unconditional surrenders imposed, general Patton saw himself as Hannibal
Quick note about pronunciation. In Semitic languages "ch" is pronounced more like "kh". Think Scottish "lach" instead of English "church". So "Shechem" is going to sound like "Shekhem".
what is karsetsch ?
The City became a Roman Colony under the aegis of the Gracchan reforms around 145 BC.
I think it did but not on the scale we think it happened, they might have done it just as a statement, statement that Augustus kinda never considered, add that to the fact that even if you do it is just like you said wilderness will take over, so maybe they did it but only for the important parts of the city
the geologist-archaeologist could, in theory, take soil core samples drilled down several feet and test them for layers of soil with a high salt content, could they not? Or, maybe they have done this before?
I just came back from Tunisia, and of course I visited Carthage. It was nice but the Roman structures such as Anthony's bathhouse were much better. If you visit Carthage, make sure to visit Sidi Bou Said as well, it's very pretty.
What places did you visit ? Did you like it ? I'd like to know
@@user-gh3cz7xx2o I also went to La Goulette, El Jem, and Mahdia along with Medina in Tunis. Everything except for La Goulette was nice. But Tunisia is pretty hard to get to and I would visit Turkey over Tunisia I think.
@@yaizudamashii hhh what's wrong with la goulette ? And what do you mean by "hard to get " ?
@@user-gh3cz7xx2o nothing is wrong with la Goulette but it wasn’t impressive enough to visit if you come from outside the country there are beach resorts closer by. There are not many flights to Tunisia and not very cheap. Which is very different from Istanbul for an example.
@@yaizudamashii i get that it's not as touristy as turkey is and i agree it feels like something is missing from tunisia ( infrastructure resorts ...) they have the same infrastructure as in 1990's ( I'm Tunisian btw)
We salt the earth here in the north all winter long and it seems to have no to little effect. The amount of salt it would take to make enough of a nations farmland unproductive to the point that the nation would be unviable would be cost prohibitive (effectively imposable) even to a modern superpower.
Actually, salt runoff as a pollutant is a big problem. So much so, that there have been efforts over the past decades to find acceptable alternatives.
So they did do it. Just not as dramatically as it's hyped up to be.
Could natron have been used in the biblical accounts?
I tried salting the weeds on a little patch of my driveway. Didn't work.
Expensive thing to do back in the time period.
That much salt would’ve been way too expensive
A more effective way of rendering vast areas uninhabitable is to deny the re-establishment of agriculture. The Romans could of made a commitment to a few generations of cyclical genocide on anyone who farms and to poison the wells and water sources.
We can see some inadvertent techniques that give a similar result; For example, in the southern United States the lack of crop-rotation and multi-year cotton agriculture had so nutritionally-depleted the soil that it is unprofitable or difficult to grow crops. This is true to this day, even with the application of modern fertilizers.
SOOOO it wasn't pink Himalayan salt???
Ayeee first again!
Nope wrong about being first 😂
@@matthewwebster3143 reveal to me my challenger!!! We shall battle for the title of FIRST!
No, it was sea water...
Well, here’s the thing about salt in soil. It can be a pretty serious issue if you are short of rain fall or you have drainage problems. The thing is, 🙄 none of these problems are actually insurmountable. It’s possible that you don’t get the same choices of crops, it’s possible that some years might have to be “fallow” years but “salted” soil isn’t going to remain permanently unproductive. This actually makes the investigation of the historical events substantially harder. It really might have happened 🤷 we probably wouldn’t be able to tell anyway!
Jesus days that in the Bible: Salt "loses its taste".
Salt was expensive in those times. I don't think Romans waste huge amounts of it just to show the point.
The word Salary comes from the noun _salt_ and the romans were paid in salt. The dead Carthagenans were covered with "calce" lime used for building, which is white too. Cement in other words , which is highly corrosive to human flesh. Moreover, the Romans completly destroyed Cathage by raising it to the ground.
Plenty of limestone around.
Carthage destruction is very similar to the site of Jericho’s (Aykent) genocide even the animals killed in Aykent apparently.
So you can't tell us if it was salted or not - and if it was salted you can't tell us what it was salted with?
Considering salt was so valuable they literally paid soldiers with it I find it hard to believe it actually happened.
Imagine a general nowadays giving some soldiers a 50k bag of diamonds each and telling them to spread them on the ground, that’s basically what ancient Roman soldiers would have saw the order of salting the ground.
Maybe they spread sea water inland.
Has anyone done the calculations to see how much salt would be required to ruin a square kilometer of land?
Salt was very expensive back then.
You're saying my grade school teachers and textbooks lied to me.😮
"Salting" the earth of defeated enemies in the ancient world didn't entail literally salting thousands of acres. That would've been prohibitively expensive.
What happened is that priests marked off a small area of the defeated enemy's land, salted that small patch, and cursed it as representative of the whole territory.
I'm sure even the Romans sometimes employed metaphors.
If the Romans plowed enough salt into the earth to make agriculture impossible, wouldn't there still be trace of it, at least on a molecular level ??? And what effect could such salting have to permanently alter the environment, the flora & the fauna in the area ??? With the current state of scientific knkwledge, you'd think that it would be possible to answer the question without resorting to historical sources.
There were two peanuts walking down the street and one of them was assaulted...
peanut.
If the romans had salted carthage, wouldn't regular rainfall have washed all the salt out by now?
Carthago deledo est (or whatever) - soiunds like a literary device.
The funniest part of the salting myth is that a century after Rome rebuilt Carthago roughly in the same spot 😂