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I personally am very skeptical of the other salt theory - salting the earth as a means of disrupting enemy soil. I started to think about it in depth when thin

by gretch 3y ago

I personally am very skeptical of the other salt theory - salting the earth as a means of disrupting enemy soil. I started to think about it in depth when thinking about weed control in my own backyard - should I salt my own soil? The I realized how quickly it would wash away in the next rain. And for ancient times, the sheer volume of salt one would need in order to disrupt a significant amount of land. I dunno maybe it happened, but it seems like a very very dumb way to go about it. Then again, humans repeatedly prove the magnitude of our stupidity.

dexwiz 3y ago
Yeah it would take a ludicrous amount to kill a field. Might as well put down gold foil weed barrier.
edaemon 3y ago
This same site has an article on that very myth: http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2016/12/salting-earth.html?m=1 http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2016/12/salting-earth.html... To summarize, salting an area was a real thing, but the evidence suggests that it was done to make the land more fertile and not less. The idea was to replace your enemy's city with weeds and greenery, as if it had never existed.
giraffe_lady 3y ago
Interestingly, accidentally making the soil too salty to support agriculture is one of the consequences of improperly managed irrigation over longish time scales, like decades to centuries. It's well understood now but I don't believe that it was to ancient peoples. I don't know how this could be weaponized or if anyone ever made a serious attempt at it. But it's experienced as massive regional catastrophe when it does, and the cause is clear even if not understood. There are places in arizona and california where salt crystals visibly form on the surface of what used to be farmland: it's plausible this would have been seen in the irrigation agriculture societies of mesopotamia and the ancient eastern mediterranean. Certainly easy to make the jump to fantasizing/praying about it happening to your enemies, once you've seen or heard of it.
deleted 3y ago
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by gretch 3y ago

dexwiz 3y ago

Yeah it would take a ludicrous amount to kill a field. Might as well put down gold foil weed barrier.

edaemon 3y ago

This same site has an article on that very myth: http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2016/12/salting-earth.html?m=1 http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2016/12/salting-earth.html... To summarize, salting an area was a real thing, but the evidence suggests that it was done to make the land more fertile and not less. The idea was to replace your enemy's city with weeds and greenery, as if it had never existed.

giraffe_lady 3y ago

Interestingly, accidentally making the soil too salty to support agriculture is one of the consequences of improperly managed irrigation over longish time scales, like decades to centuries. It's well understood now but I don't believe that it was to ancient peoples. I don't know how this could be weaponized or if anyone ever made a serious attempt at it. But it's experienced as massive regional catastrophe when it does, and the cause is clear even if not understood. There are places in arizona and california where salt crystals visibly form on the surface of what used to be farmland: it's plausible this would have been seen in the irrigation agriculture societies of mesopotamia and the ancient eastern mediterranean. Certainly easy to make the jump to fantasizing/praying about it happening to your enemies, once you've seen or heard of it.

deleted 3y ago

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