The ancient Egyptians may have been the first to cure meat and fish with salt. The earliest Chinese record of preserving fish in salt dates from around 2000 B.C. Salted fish and birds have been found in Egyptian tombs from considerably earlier. Curing flesh in salt absorbs the moisture in which bacteria grows. Furthermore, the salt itself kills bacteria. Some of the impurities found in ancient sodium chloride were other salts such as saltpeter, which are even more aggressive bacteria slayers. Proteins unwind when exposed to heat, and they do the same when exposed to salt. So salting has an effect resembling cooking.
Whether the Egyptians discovered this process first or not, they were certainly the first civilization to preserve food on a large scale. Those narrow fertile strips on either bank of the Nile were their principal source of food, and a dry year in which the Nile failed to flood could be disastrous. To be prepared, Egyptians put up food in every way they could, including stockpiling grain in huge silos. This fixation on preserving a food supply led to considerable knowledge of curing and fermentation.
Were it not for their aversion to pigs, the Egyptians would probably have invented ham, for they salt-cured meat and knew how to domesticate the pig. But Egyptian religious leadership pronounced pigs carriers of leprosy, made pig farmers social outcasts, and never depicted the animal on the walls of tombs. They tried to domesticate for meat the hyenas that scavenged the edge of villages looking for scraps and dead animals to eat, but most Egyptians were revolted by the idea of eating such an animal. Other failed Egyptian attempts at animal husbandry include antelope, gazelle, oryx, and ibex. In the northern Sinai and what is now the southern Israeli Negev Desert, the remnants of pens for such fauna, the remains of these failed experiments, have been found. But the Egyptians did succeed in domesticating fowl—ducks, geese, quail, pigeon, and pelican. Ancient walls show fowl being splayed, salted, and put into large earthen jars.
A great source of Egyptian food was the wetlands of the Nile, the reedy marshes where fowl could be found, as well as fish such as carp, eel, mullet, perch, and tigerfish. The Egyptians salted much of this fish. They also dried, salted, and pressed the eggs of mullet, creating another of the great Mediterranean foods known in Italian as bottarga.
The Egyptians lay claim to another pivotal food invention: making the fruit of the olive tree edible. Almost every Mediterranean culture claims olives as its discovery. The Egyptians of 4000 B.C. believed that the goddess Isis, wife of Osiris, taught them how to grow olives. The Greeks have a similar legend. But the Hebrew word for olive, zait, is probably older than the Greek word, elaia, and is thought to refer to Said in the Nile Delta. It may have been Syrians or Cretans who first bred the Olea europaea from the pathetic, scraggly, wild oleaster tree. The Egyptians were not great olive oil producers and imported most of their olive oil from the Middle East. The fresh-picked fruit of the olive tree is so hard and bitter, so unappealing, that it is a wonder anyone experimented long enough to find a way to make it edible. But the Egyptians learned very early that the bitter glucides unique to this fruit, now known as oleuropeina, could be removed from the fruit by soaking in water, and the fruit could be softened in brine. The salt would render it not only edible but enjoyable.
Making olives and making olive oil are at cross purposes, since a good eating olive is low in oil content. It may be that this was characteristic of Egyptian olives. These eating olives were included in the food caches of ancient Egyptian tombs.
The Egyptians were the inventors of raised bread. To make leavened bread, a gluten-producing grain, not barley or millet, was necessary, and about 3000 B.C. the Egyptians developed wheat that could be ground and stretched into a dough capable of entrapping carbon dioxide from yeast. The starting yeast was often leftover fermented dough, sour dough, which is another example of lactic acid fermentation. Egyptian bakers created an enormous variety of breads in different shapes, sometimes with the addition of honey or milk or eggs. Most of these doughs, as with modern breads, were made from a base of flour, water, and a pinch of salt.
In 1250 B.C., when Moses liberated the Hebrew slaves, leading them out of Egypt across the Sinai, the Hebrews took with them only flat unleavened bread, matzo, which is described by the Hebrew phrase lechem oni, meaning “bread of the poor.” Poor Egyptians did not have the sumptuous assortment of Egyptian raised bread but, like people outside of Egypt, ate flat bread known as ta, which sometimes had coarse grain, even chaff, in it and lacked the luxury of “a pinch of salt.” According to Jewish legend, the fleeing Hebrews took unleavened bread because they lacked time to let the bread rise. But it may also have been what they were used to making, or perhaps it was a conscious rejection of Egyptian culture and the luxuries of the slave owners. Raised bread and salt curing were emblematic of the high-living Egyptians.
THE EGYPTIANS MADE salt by evaporating seawater in the Nile Delta. They also may have procured some salt from Mediterranean trade. They clearly obtained salt from African trade, especially from Libya and Ethiopia. But they also had their own desert of dried salt lakes and salt deposits. It is known that they had a number of varieties of salt, including a table salt called “Northern salt” and another called “red salt,” which may have come from a lake near Memphis.
Long before seventeenth- and eighteenth-century chemists began identifying and naming the elements of different salts, ancient alchemists, healers, and cooks were aware that different salts existed, with different tastes and chemical properties that made them suitable for different tasks. The Chinese had invented gunpowder by isolating saltpeter, potassium nitrate. The Egyptians found a salt that, though they could not have expressed it in these terms, is a mixture of sodium bicarbonate and sodium carbonate with a small amount of sodium chloride. They found this salt in nature in a wadi, an Arab word for a dry riverbed, some forty miles northwest of Cairo. The spot was called Natrun, and they named the salt netjry, or natron, after the wadi. Natron is found in “white” and “red,” though white natron is usually gray and red natron is pink. The ancient Egyptians referred to natron as “the divine salt.”
The culminating ritual of the lengthy Egyptian funeral was known as “the opening of the mouth,” in which a symbolic cutting of the umbilical cord freed the corpse to eat in the afterlife, just as cutting a newborn baby’s cord is the prelude to its taking earthly nourishment. In 1352 B.C., the child pharoah Tutankhamen died at the age of eighteen, and his tomb, discovered in 1922, is the most elaborate and well preserved ever found. The tomb was furnished with a bronze knife for the symbolic cutting of the cord, surrounded by four shrines, each containing cups filled with the two vital ingredients for preserving mummies: resin and natron.
Investigators argue about whether sodium chloride was used in mummification. It is difficult to know, since natron contains a small amount of sodium chloride that leaves traces of common salt in all mummies. Sodium chloride appears to have been used instead of natron in some burials of less affluent people.
Herodotus, though writing more than two millennia after the practice began, offered a description in gruesome detail of ancient Egyptian mummification, which, with a few exceptions, such as his confusion of juniper oil for cedar oil, has stood up to the examination and chemical analysis of modern archaeology. The techniques bear remarkable similarity to the Egyptian practice of preserving birds and fish through disembowelment and salting:
The most perfect process is as follows: As much as possible of the brain is removed via the nostrils with an iron hook, and what cannot be reached with the hook is washed out with drugs; next, the flank is opened with a flint knife and the whole contents of the abdomen removed; the cavity is then thoroughly cleaned and washed out, firstly with palm wine and again with an infusion of ground spices. After that, it is filled with pure myrrh, cassia and every other aromatic substance, excepting frankincense, and sewn up again, after which the body is placed in natron, covered entirely over, for seventy days—never longer. When this period is over, the body is washed and then wrapped fr
om head to foot in linen cut into strips and smeared on the underside with gum, which is commonly used by the Egyptians instead of glue. In this condition the body is given back to the family, who have a wooden case made, shaped like a human figure, into which it is put.
He then gave a less expensive method and finally the discount technique:
The third method, used for embalming the bodies of the poor, is simply to wash out the intestines, and keep the body for seventy days in natron.
The parallels between preserving food and preserving mummies were apparently not lost on posterity. In the nineteenth century, when mummies from Saqqara and Thebes were taken from tombs and brought to Cairo, they were taxed as salted fish before being permitted entry to the city.
MORE THAN A gastronomic development, the salting of fowl and especially of fish was an important step in the development of economies. In the ancient world, the Egyptians were leading exporters of raw foods such as wheat and lentils. Although salt was a valuable commodity for trade, it was bulky. By making a product with the salt, a value was added per pound, and unlike fresh food, salt fish, well handled, would not spoil. The Egyptians did not export great quantities of salt, but exported considerable amounts of salted food, especially fish, to the Middle East. Trade in salted food would shape economies for the next four millennia.
About 2800 B.C., the Egyptians began trading salt fish for Phoenician cedar, glass, and purple dye made from seashells by a secret Phoenician formula. The Phoenicians had built a trade empire with these products, but, in time, they also traded the products of their partners, such as Egyptian salt fish and North African salt, throughout the Mediterranean.
Originally inhabiting a narrow strip of land on the Lebanese coast north of Mount Carmel, the Phoenicians were a mixture of races, only partly Semitic. They never fused into a homogenous nation. Culturally, other people, first the Egyptians and later the Greeks, dominated their way of life. But economically, they were a leading power operating from major ports such as Tyre.
Splitting and salt curing fish is illustrated in an Egyptian wall painting in the tomb of Puy-em-rê, Second Priest of Amun, circa 1450 B.C.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
They traded with everyone they encountered. When Solomon constructed a temple in Jerusalem, the Phoenicians provided both wood—their famous “cedars of Lebanon”—and craftsmen. In the Old Testament it is mentioned that Jerusalem fish markets were supplied from Tyre, and the fish they sold was probably salted fish, since fresh fish would have spoiled before reaching Jerusalem.
It is a Mediterranean habit to credit great food ideas to the Phoenicians. They are said to have spread the olive tree throughout the Mediterranean. The Spanish say the Phoenicians introduced chickpeas, a western Asian bean, to the western Mediterranean, though evidence of wild native chickpeas has been found in the Catalan part of southern France. Some French writers have said the Phoenicians invented bouillabaisse, which is probably not true, and the Sicilians say the Phoenicians were the first to catch bluefin tuna off their western coast, which probably is true. The Phoenicians also established a saltworks on the western side of the island of Sicily, near present-day Trapani, to cure the catch.
Ancient Phoenician coins with images of the tuna have been found near a number of Mediterranean ports. At the time, bluefin tuna, the swift, steel-blue-backed fish that is the largest member of the tuna family, might have attained sizes of over 1,500 pounds each, but this is according to ancient writers who also believed the fish fed on acorns. Seeking warmer water for spawning, bluefin leave the Atlantic Ocean, enter the Strait of Gibraltar, pass by North Africa and western Sicily, cruise past Greece, swim through the Bosporus and into the Black Sea. At all the points of land near the bluefin’s passage in the Mediterranean, the Phoenicians established tuna fisheries.
About 800 B.C., when the Phoenicians first settled on the coast of what is today Tunisia, they founded a seaport, Sfax, which still prospers today. Sfax became, and has remained, a source of salt and salted fish for Mediterranean trade. The Phoenicians also founded Cadiz in southern Spain, from where they exported tin. Almost 2,500 years before the Portuguese mariners explored West Africa, the Phoenicians sailed from Cadiz through the Strait of Gibraltar and on to the West African coast.
The Phoenicians are also credited with the first alphabet. Chinese and Egyptian languages used pictographs, drawings depicting objects or concepts. Babylonian, which became the international language in the Middle East, also had a long list of characters, each standing for a word or combination of sounds. But the Phoenicians used a Semitic forerunner of ancient Hebrew, the earliest traces of which were found in the Sinai from 1400 B.C., which had only twenty-two characters, each representing a particular sound. It was the simplicity of this alphabet as much as their commercial prowess that opened up trade in the ancient Mediterranean.
INLAND FROM THE port of Sfax are dried desert lake beds where salt can be scraped up in the dry season. This technique, the same as was used 8,000 years ago on Lake Yuncheng in China, and referred to as “dragging and gathering,” was the original Egyptian way of salt gathering, the method used for harvesting natron in the wadi of Natrun. The Arabs called such a saltworks a sebkha, and on a modern map of North Africa, from the Egyptian-Libyan border to the Algerian-Moroccan line, from Sabkaht Shunayn to Sebkha de Tindouf, sebkhas are still clearly labeled.
In ancient times, the Fezzan region, today in southern Libya, had contact with Egypt and the Mediterranean. Herodotus wrote of the use of horses and chariots for warfare in Fezzan, which was unusual at the time. Even more unusual, horses also may have been used to transport salt. By the third century B.C., Fezzan was noted for its salt production. Fezzan producers had moved beyond simply scraping the sebkhas. The crust was boiled until fairly pure crystals had been separated, and they were then molded into three-foot-high white tapered cylinders. Traders then carried these oddly phallic objects, carefully wrapped in straw mats, by caravan across the desert. Salt is still made and transported the same way today in parts of the Sahara.
Because a profitable salt shipment is bulky and heavy, accessible transportation has always been the essential ingredient in salt trade. In most of Asia, Europe, and the Americas, waterways have been the solution. Salt was traded either through seagoing ports or, as in Sichuan, by a sprawling river system. But in the African continent, where a wealth of salt was located in the wadis and dry lake beds of the waterless Sahara, another solution was found—the camel.
The earliest known journeys across the Sahara, in about 1000 B.C., were by oxen and then by horse-drawn chariots. Trans-Saharan commerce existed in ancient times, but crossings were rare events until the third century A.D., when the camel replaced the horse. The camel was a native of North America, though it became extinct there two million years ago. Around 3000 B.C. , relatively late in the history of animal domestication, camels were domesticated in the Middle East. The wild species has vanished. Between the domestication of the camel and its use in the Sahara, several millennia passed. But once the domestic camel made its Sahara debut, its use spread quickly. By the Middle Ages, caravans of 40,000 camels carried salt from Taoudenni to Timbuktu, a 435-mile journey taking as long as one month. Since then, continuing to this day, caravans of camels have moved bulk goods across the Sahara to western and central Africa. As the trade prospered, so did banditry, and the caravans grew in size for protection. As salt moved south, gold, kola nut, leather, and cotton from Hausaland, in present-day Nigeria, was traded north. Later, products for Europe, including acacia gum, which was needed for fabric sizing, and melegueta pepper, the seeds of an orange West African fruit that were a Renaissance European food craze, were also brought north. Slaves, too, were taken on this route and even at times traded for salt.
In 1352, Ibn Batuta, the greatest Arab-language traveler of the Middle Ages, who had journeyed overland across Africa, Europe, and Asia, reported visiting the city of Taghaza, which, he said, was entirely built of salt, includ
ing an elaborate mosque. By the time Europeans first discovered it in the nineteenth century, the fabled western Saharan city of salt had been abandoned. Taghaza was not the earliest report of buildings made of salt. The first-century-A.D. Roman Pliny the Elder, writing of rock salt mining in Egypt, mentioned houses built of salt.
Taghaza is imagined as a sparkling white city, but it was swept by Saharan sands, and the pockmarked salt turned a dingy gray. Though its salt construction impressed later travelers, salt blocks were the only material available for building, and Taghaza was probably a miserable work camp, inhabited mostly by the slaves forced to work it, who completely depended on the arrival of caravans to bring them food.
In ancient Taghaza, salt was quarried from the near surface in 200-pound blocks loaded on camels, one block on each side. The powerful animals carried them 500 miles to Timbuktu, a trading center because of its location on the northernmost crook of the Niger River, which connects most of West Africa. In Timbuktu, the goods of North Africa, the Sahara, and West Africa were exchanged, and the wealth from trade built a cultural center. Timbuktu became a university town, a center of learning. But to the locals in Taghaza, salt was worth nothing except as a building material. They lacked everything but salt.
It was said that in the markets to the south of Taghaza salt was exchanged for its weight in gold, which was an exaggeration. The misconception comes from the West African style of silent barter noted by Herodotus and subsequently by many other Europeans. In the gold-producing regions of West Africa, a pile of gold would be set out, and a salt merchant would counter with a pile of salt, each side altering their piles until an agreement was reached. No words were exchanged during this process, which might take days. The salt merchants often arrived at night to adjust their piles and leave unseen. They were extremely secretive, not wanting to reveal the location of their deposits. From this it was reported in Europe that salt was exchanged in Africa for its weight in gold. But it is probable that the final agreed-upon two piles were never of equal weight.
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