The Boring Truth about the Salting of Carthage - it isn't what you think
Vložit
- čas přidán 16. 04. 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” 😂
😂
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 . . .
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.
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.
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...
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?"
The equivalent phrase to salting the earth now would be to glass them. It was probably a turn of phrase.
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.
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
Roman soldiers, looking at millions of tonnes of salt: You want us to what
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*.
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!
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
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
salt was way too expensive in antiquity to use it for actual "salting" whatever they used, it was not actual salt
Excellent point. Roman soldiers were paid in salt . . . so it had value.
Isn’t that sort of a myth though that salt was expensive? I could be wrong though
Yes you could easily make salt from salt water @@TAKE_BACK_BRITAIN
@@TAKE_BACK_BRITAINthe word salary literally comes from salt
Unless they channeled salty ocean water into irrigation canals. Thus "salting" the earth.
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. 🤔
You learn something new every day. Thanks.
Maybe breaking down sea walls and/or pumping sea water into agricultural fields is a more cost effective way to salt the earth.
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...
there is also the idea of salt having a purifying role and Carthage being in need of such action
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.
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
It's not boring. It's fascinating!
3:15 Future generations will remember the 19th century as the golden age of historical mendacity, followed closely by the 18th.
Well put. Case in point: The Irish were simply too damn stupid to grow multiple crops (beyond potatoes), so sadly perished in enormous numbers in an act completely NOT British-managed genocide... whilst simultaneously dominating English language literature for the coming century and a half (Yeates, Wilde, Stoker, Joyce and 50 others).
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.
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.
"obliterated" vs "conquered and returned to nature as if it never existed" seems like the same thing to me
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.
Sounds interesting to me!
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.
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.
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'.
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.
yea its from a 1848 book. the salting. or 1824?28?
"Yeah", I believe. "Yea" is the opposite of "nay".
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
Could natron have been used in the biblical accounts?
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.
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.
What city is now?
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.
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
I wonder if part of the reason the myth stuck around is that the destruction of Carthage and the associated economic/political structure was so complete that it was *as if* the city had been salted. Even the language of the Carthaginian people would die out.
I always thought this was odd, considering the region would become an important source of grain and food for Rome later.
I salted my backyard with water softner salt I bought from Home Depot.
Weeds didn't care.
I have learnd that they dind't salt earth in second punic war but the in third tell me if I am wrong and ceaser rebuild the citie next to the old
Becaus I dont know
For anyone listening, I suggest giving Dan Carlin's "Punic Nightmares" series a chance. It covers this event in detail.
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 have all notifications from you on.
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).
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.
I think I heard somewhere that what actually happened was that Rome set aside a very small plot of land in or near the city of Rome that they “let” Carthage annex and then salted that small plot with salt as a symbolic gesture.
What actually happened was what he described in the video--people in the Middle Ages started conflating and combining "salting the earth" stories with the real destruction of Carthage. What you, or your source, is doing is trying to rationalize and not let go of that myth by combining it with another Roman practice--designating a small plot as "foreign" soil so it could be symbolically invaded. It is interesting how we as humans seek to keep explaining something even after the original reason for believing it is gone.
I reckon salt would have been too expensive. And salting the earth probably meant having Roman citizens in Carthage...
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.
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.
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.
One of the first unconditional surrenders imposed, general Patton saw himself as Hannibal
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.
Thank you for your boring story.
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!
Having visited modern Carthage I can confirm that there is plenty of plant life, & how does this fit with the phrase 'salt of the earth' as a positive idea?
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.
Wait, you're telling their actually were cities that were salted?! Not Carthage but some in the Near East...
I do seem to remember that Mesopotamia had a lot of problems dealing with salt build up in their soil, possibly a side-effect of irrigation. Maybe it didn't take much effort there to ruin the soil for wheat.
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?
The City became a Roman Colony under the aegis of the Gracchan reforms around 145 BC.
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.
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!
It is a metaphore ....
Expensive thing to do back in the time period.
Was there a Battle of Zama? and if so was it as epic as described by the Romans or did they pump up the numbers for propaganda purposes?
Salting the Carthage might have been used metaphorically, not literally as just meaning the city's destruction.
Carthago deledo est (or whatever) - soiunds like a literary device.
Salting the soil to make it less fertile could barely be the case. In fact the area was still one of the empire's bread baskets and Carthage .
Also, salt (as in NaCl at least) was much too valuable and fertile land was in high regards. Sack the city, enslave the population, romanize get the most out of the region. The Romans usually conquered to stay.
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".
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?
So they did do it. Just not as dramatically as it's hyped up to be.
Well, thanks for ruining the memes!
In thousands of hours of research I never encountered the salting legend. Not sure why you're treating it like it's the main fact everyone knows about this topic.
A metaphor for not letting Carthage rise again? 🤷🏻♀️
This. Even after the Second Punic War and Hannibal's assassination, Rome was afraid that Carthage would revive and challenge them again. Carthage was wealthy and well-situated and they paid off the indemnity from the Second Punic War faster than expected. That's why there was a Third Punic War - the Romans decided they had to settle it once and for all.
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".
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!
"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.
Carthage destruction is very similar to the site of Jericho’s (Aykent) genocide even the animals killed in Aykent apparently.
I never bought into that myth
I mean, just considering the sheer logistics and pricetag of finding enough salt to spray on a whole city, that alone disproves it, no ? Salt used to be quite precious. The Romans didn't have the technology/production capability we have, to casually just use tons and tons like we spray on roads... I'm quite sure something like that could actually easily bankrupt the state.
And beyond that, it's not like salt is that effective as a plant killer, especially long term. We spray tons of it each year during the winter months (so more than a One time event), and a lot of it ends up in the nearby vegetation. And yet, plant life still persevere, the roadside isn't a desert. I don't think the Romans thought anything like that would work...
So at best, it would be a symbolic/religious event with a little salt being thrown...
The salt was salted just like how the legionaries never slashed with the gladius >_>
Salt was too valuable to waste on some hyper revenge thing. Maybe they used saltwater or some mineral salt deposit. Salting in a wet weather climate wouldn't work for very long and let's be real, Carthage was on the sea so it's not like the soils were not a bit salty from its location.
You're saying my grade school teachers and textbooks lied to me.😮
I'm sure even the Romans sometimes employed metaphors.
The thing about salting the earth in Carthage is a conjured story of bragging by Roman accounts.Salt was too valuable in these times to be harvested and wasted on a new conquered territory and would have not served the long term interests of Roman rule in that region.
Just like Caligula appointing his horse as Consul, but it will be remembered while the truth is abandoned😒
Also I can’t remember if it was the Romans or the Israelites but after victory every soldier would pick up a stone and toss it in a field. An army’s worth of rocks ruins a field of agriculture and it may never recover depending on how few workers there are to begin removing them
If the romans had salted carthage, wouldn't regular rainfall have washed all the salt out by now?
A large city like Carthage would need a lot of farmland. How many acres and how many tons of salt?? I doubted that it happened to, especially as the Romans now owned it!!
The Roman, description of the siege and destruction of Carthage pretty horrific. I encourage you to seek it out and read it. (Polibius)
Primo, it’s too much salt is needed and it’s used to be quite expensive;
Secundo, The Imperia needed taxes, so no, it wouldn’t destroy the source of income
I thought this was true. But I wondered because I believe salt was expensive back then. It was even a part of the Roman soldiers pay, I think!
In Roman times salt was expensive (used as preserver for meat's and other foods). Pouring expensive stuff over ground is idiotic.
Salt was very expensive back then.
Did anyone really think that they actually salted the earth?
And probably the "salting of the earth" of ancient middle eastern origin was probably largely just kings taking credit for natural processes. More like "my great king ancestor was greater than your king ancestor, see that salty march was a village he completely obliterated". That kind of stuff. Not merely as a statement of power over the elements but also incredible wealth. Salt was after all very valuable and just using insane amounts simply to destroy another town is showing off immense wealth. So I suspect it was pretty much just made up propaganda even in the biblical and earlier bronze age Mesopotamian context. Pretty much anything you find in writing from the bronze age is hyperbole.
As far as salting is concerned, I offer a simple metaphor that says we take some things, largely thought to be true or accurate "with a grain of salt". Literally no one actually does that with salt. So I'm thinking "salting the earth" in similarity; nobody literally does that in this grand context. Some have commented to what one might think to be contrarian examples but in those cases we are talking about practical uses, like, for example, we do add salt to our meals. We don't otherwise take our meals with "a grain of salt"...LOL...Or maybe you do!
So "literally" (your word, not mine) people have done this for many centuries. As a greatly valued commodity, pinches of salt could be thrown over the left shoulder to appease the devil. That was just materialism. The value of the commodity had nothing to do with its inherent composition, but with its importance as a status symbol in politically correct symposia. Here, the devil should take the hindmost, hence this popular superstition. The materialism of the salt would deflect the devil from interfering in the search for (antimaterialistic) truth. Thus the importance of "grains of salt".