By Sebastian Fink

 

Salt was a common thing in Mesopotamia. It is an essential part of human civilization; everyone knew it, had it and used it – so there was no need to talk about it. Therefore, salt tends to be part of the background experience of the Assyriologist and requires a special occasion to draw our attention to it.

Common salt. (https://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-05-chemistry-salt-kitchen.html)

 

In my case, this special occasion was a trip to Iaşi in northeast Romania. The conference I attended dealt with genealogies and I gave a talk on Gilgameš –typical for my work in Assyriology. Of course, I consumed salt, but did not pay any attention to it until the last day of my stay. Professor Marius Alexianu took me to the airport and began to talk about his passion: salt. He had undertaken ethnoarchaeological studies, investigating ancient and modern Romanian sources of salt, and had organized a conference “From the ethnoarchaeology to the anthropology of salt.” No Assyriologists had attended that event and so Marius asked me to write something on salt in Mesopotamia.

I started to search for salt in Mesopotamia and discovered that such an everyday topic can be a fascinating and rewarding task, but one that calls for comparative methods in order to overcome the meagre sources. Salt had two major aspects for the Mesopotamian civilizations. On the one hand, it was indispensable for many human dietary and industrial activities, but on the other, the high degree of salt in the Euphrates and the Tigris combined with intensive irrigation caused the salinization of agricultural lands. Salinization was one of the greatest threats to Mesopotamian agriculture since the salt tolerance of crops is limited. With rising concentrations of salt, the yield of fields starts to decline and some point can no longer be cultivated.

Map of salinization in modern Iraq. W. Wu et al., Soil Salinity Mapping by Multiscale Remote Sensing in Mesopotamia, Iraq, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing 7 (2014): 4442-4452.

 

“Let the black fields become white.” An example from Colorado. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_salinity#/media/File:Salinity.jpg)

 

The terminology for salt in Sumerian and Akkadian is astonishingly rich. In both languages we have designations for a variety of salts: red salt, crystal salt, table salt, and uncleaned salt. The three designations, marine salt, rock salt, and salt brick, give evidence of three different sources: the sea, salt mines, and bricks cut from dried up lakes or swamps during the summer. Additionally, there is some kind of salt made out of plants. But how can we identify the sources of salt in Mesopotamia?

In a fascinating study, Assyriologist and archaeologist Daniel Potts analyzed documents from the 19th century Ottoman Public Debt Administration, which was charged with the administration of the state salt monopoly. They documented and controlled every source of salt in Mesopotamia, and on the basis of this Potts was able to demonstrate that there were plenty of sources of salt in Mesopotamia, although with varying quality.

Comparative studies like the one conducted by Potts are often necessary for Mesopotamia as much practical knowledge belonged to the oral sphere and was written down only in exceptional cases. In Sumerian literature, salt is not a very prominent topic and occurs only in very few instances. Here I quote two of them. The first is a proverb stressing the importance of salt:

The poor man should die, he should not live. When he finds bread, he does not find salt. When he finds salt, he does not find bread.

The meaning is obvious – a poor man always lacks something, even the most basic things. When we turn to maqlû, one of the most important Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft texts dating to the first millennium BCE, we find praise of salt that will purify the suffering person from witchcraft:

You are salt that was made in a pure place; For the food of the great gods Enlil appointed you. Without you, the royal banquet is not set in the Ekur; Without you, god, king, lord and prince do not smell incense.

The two passages demonstrate that salt was used as a spice, a fact that is also confirmed by the recipes we have from cuneiform sources, almost all of which contain salt. Besides its use in human and animal nutrition, salt was also used in many industries. It was needed for tanning, for the production of glazes for ceramics and bricks, and possibly in metallurgy. Lexical lists and administrative documents provide us with an abundance of evidence about salted fish and salted meat, although they do not tell us much about the actual procedures of preparation. A comparative analysis of the Mesopotamian fish industry with the well-documented Roman fish industry would be a promising field of study, since judging from the available data, very similar products like salted fish and fish-sauce were produced.

A Roman fish-sauce factory in Baelo Claudia, Spain. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum#/media/File:Factor%C3%ADa_de_salazones_001.jpg)

 

Such techniques for preserving fish and meat through salt might have turned these products into valuable exports for the inhabitants of southern Mesopotamia, which lacks many natural resources. The evidence for Mesopotamian exports in the third millennium is so meager that one scholar, Harriet Crawford, spoke about “Mesopotamia’s invisible exports.” We might speculate that salt, salted fish, fish sauce and salted meat might have belonged to this group.

Another relevant passage comes from a Sumerian text where two materials, copper and silver, hold a ‘debate’ about their relative merits, while touching on another negative aspect of salt, which has to be removed from agricultural fields together with the quick-growing mustard plant:

When salt and mustard which are located at the side of the field are removed.

Wild mustard weeds. (https://courses.missouristate.edu/pbtrewatha/wild_mustard.htm)

 

The danger of soil salinization is also reflected in Sumerian and Akkadian curses. There, the wish is expressed that salt should appear in the fields of the party breaking an oath. However, the most impressive version of such a curse is found in the story of Atrahasis (a text written in the second millennium BCE), where the god Enlil finally decides to extinguish mankind with a flood. Before sending a flood, he tries several other plagues, one of which is hunger:

Cut off the food supplies from the peoples. […] Let the fields diminish their yields, let Nisaba turn aside her breast, let the black fields become white, let the broad plain produce salt!

The famous Assyriologist Thorkild Jacobsen developed a theory that explained Mesopotamian history in part as a function of salinization.

Exploitation of surface-salt near ancient Nippur (modern Abu Salabikh). (https://allmesopotamia.wordpress.com/tag/abu-salabikh/)

 

He was convinced that major historical events, like the end of the Ur III state in the late third millennium BCE, could be explained by the progressive salinization of the fields in southern Mesopotamia. Recent studies doubt this theory, since we are not able to determine when Mesopotamian farmers developed methods to deal with salinization, which remains an obstacle for modern agriculture. Understanding local Mesopotamian responses to salinization is one area where the study of cuneiform texts along side archaeological data will be very useful.

Since Marius Alexianu raised my awareness of salt and salinization, their role in Mesopotamian economy and history have become a small but important part of my research. And Marius and his team have organized conferences since 2012, in Japan, Mexico, Spain, Jordan and other places, bringing together scholars from many areas and disciplines to study something common to all. Something commonplace is now becoming better understood, and is fostering the international and interdisciplinary study of the anthropology of salt.

 

Sebastian Fink is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki.