Salting the earth, or sowing with salt, is the ritual of spreading salt on conquered cities to symbolize a curse on its re-inhabitation.[1][2] It originated as a practice in the ancient Near East and became a well-established folkloric motif in the Middle Ages.[3]
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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.
Various Hittite and Assyrian texts speak of ceremonially strewing salt, minerals, or plants (cress, or kudimmu, which produced a kind of salt or lye) over destroyed cities, including Hattusa, Taidu, Arinna, Hunusa,[2] Irridu,[4] and Susa.[5] The Book of Judges (9:45) says that Abimelech, the judge of the Israelites, sowed his own capital, Shechem, with salt, ca. 1050 BC, after quelling a revolt against him. This may have been part of a ḥērem ritual.[2] (cf. Salt in the Bible)
Starting in the 19th century,[6] various texts claim that the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus Africanus plowed over and sowed the city of Carthage with salt after defeating it in the Third Punic War (146 BC), sacking it, and forcing the survivors into slavery. However, no ancient sources exist documenting this. The Carthage story is a later invention, probably modelled on the story of Shechem.[7] The ritual of symbolically drawing a plow over the site of a city is, however, mentioned in ancient sources, though not in reference to Carthage specifically.[8]
When Pope Boniface VIII destroyed Palestrina in 1299, he ordered it plowed "following the old example of Carthage in Africa", and also salted.[9] "I have run the plough over it, like the ancient Carthage of Africa, and I have had salt sown upon it...."[10] The text is not clear as to whether he thought Carthage was salted. Later accounts of other 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).[11]
In Spain and the Spanish Empire, salt was poured onto the land owned by a convicted traitor (often one who was executed and his head placed on a picota, or pike, afterwards) after his house was demolished.
Likewise, in Portugal, salt was poured onto the land owned by a convicted traitor. The last known event of this sort was the destruction of the Duke of Aveiro's palace in Lisbon in 1759, due to his participation in the Távora affair (a conspiracy against King Joseph I of Portugal). His palace was demolished and his land was salted. A stone memorial now perpetuates the memory of the shame of the Duke, where it is written:
In this place were put to the ground and salted the houses of José Mascarenhas, stripped of the honours of Duque de Aveiro and others.... Put to Justice as one of the leaders of the most barbarous and execrable upheaval that... was committed against the most royal and sacred person of the Lord Joseph I. In this infamous land nothing may be built for all time.
In Portuguese-ruled Brazil, the leader of the Inconfidência Mineira, Tiradentes, was sentenced to death and his house was "razed and salted, so that never again be built up on the floor, ... and even the floor will rise up a standard by which the memory is preserved the infamy of this heinous offender...".
An ancient legend says that Odysseus feigned madness by yoking a horse and an ox to his plow and sowing salt.[12]