Salt Read Free

control because its friendly young cubs could be fed and trained. A dangerous adversary was turned into a dedicated helper—the dog.
As glaciers melted, huge fields of wild grain appeared. Humans, but also wild sheep and goats, fed on these fields. The initial human reaction was probably to kill these animals that threatened their food supply. But tribes living near such fields soon realized that sheep and goats could become a dependable food source if they could control them. Their dogs could even help in this work. By 8900 B.C. , sheep were domesticated in Iraq, though they may have been domesticated in other places even earlier.
Around 8000 B.C. , women in the Near East began planting seeds of wild grains in cleared fields. This is usually thought to have been the beginning of agriculture. But in 1970, a University of Hawaii expedition to Burma, now known as Myanmar, reported finding in a place called Spirit Cave the remnants of what seemed to be cultivated vegetables—peas, water chestnuts, and cucumbers—carbon-dated to the year 9750 B.C.
Pigs came later, about 7000 B.C. , because they would not simply graze on grass, and it took time to see the benefit of keeping animals for whom food had to be gathered. It was not until about 6000 B.C. in Turkey or the Balkans that people successfully carried out the daunting task of domesticating the large, fast, and powerful aurochs. Through controlling their diet, castrating males, and corralling the animals into constricted spaces, people eventually turned the wild aurochs into cattle. Cattle became a mainstay food, consuming huge quantities of both grain and salt. The aurochs, fast-footed and ferocious, were hunted into extinction by the mid–seventeenth century.
Where people ate a diet consisting largely of grains and vegetables, supplemented by the meat of slaughtered domestic farm animals, procuring salt became a necessity of life, giving it great symbolic importance and economic value. Salt became one of the first international commodities of trade; its production was one of the first industries and, inevitably, the first state monopoly.

T HE SEARCH FOR salt has challenged engineers for millennia and created some of the most bizarre, along with some of the most ingenious, machines. A number of the greatest public works ever conceived were motivated by the need to move salt. Salt has been in the forefront of the development of both chemistry and geology. Trade routes that have remained major thoroughfares were established, alliances built, empires secured, and revolutions provoked—all for something that fills the ocean, bubbles up from springs, forms crusts in lake beds, and thickly veins a large part of the earth’s rock fairly close to the surface.
Almost no place on earth is without salt. But this was not clear until revealed by modern geology, and so for all of history until the twentieth century, salt was desperately searched for, traded for, and fought over. For millennia, salt represented wealth. Caribbean salt merchants stockpiled it in the basements of their homes. The Chinese, the Romans, the French, the Venetians, the Hapsburgs, and numerous other governments taxed it to raise money for wars. Soldiers and sometimes workers were paid in salt. It was often used as money.
In his 1776 treatise on capitalism, The Wealth of Nations , Adam Smith pointed out that almost anything of value could be used for money. He cited as examples tobacco, sugar, dried cod, and cattle and stated that “salt is said to be a common instrument of commerce and exchanges in Abyssinia.” But he offered the opinion that the best currency was made of metal because it was physically durable, even if its value was as ephemeral as other commodities.
Today, thousands of years of coveting, fighting over, hoarding, taxing, and searching for salt appear picturesque and slightly foolish. The seventeenth-century British leaders who spoke with urgency about the dangerous national dependence on