The fact that in ancient Egypt the poor were mummified with sodium chloride and the rich with natron suggests that the Egyptians valued natron more. But the reverse appears to have been true in other parts of ancient Africa. Generally, the richer Africans used salt with higher sodium chloride content, and natron was the salt of the poor. In West Africa white natron was used for bean cakes of millet or sorghum, called kunu. The natron in this dish was thought to be beneficial to nursing mothers. Natron was preferred to salt for bean dishes because it was thought that the carbonate counteracted gas. It was also used, and still is, as a stomach medicine—a natural bicarbonate of soda. Natron was believed to be a male aphrodisiac as well.
In Timbuktu, which was a center of not only the salt trade but the tobacco trade, a mixture of tobacco and natron was chewed. The Hausa also used natron to dissolve indigo so that the color could be fixed. Soap was made from natron and an oil from the kernel of the shea butter tree.
The African salt market has always distinguished between a wide assortment of salts, most of them impure. Salt that was mainly sodium chloride was used exclusively for eating. Sodium chloride, natron, and other salts of varying impurities, from different locations, were widely known by their own names. African merchants, healers, and cooks were well versed in this array of salts. Trona was the name of a well-known natron valued for food; it was gathered from the shore of Lake Chad.
Africans have maintained a tradition of a wide variety of different salts for different dishes, but they always treat any salt as a valuable substance that must not be wasted. R. Omosunlola Williams, a Nigerian educator, published a cookbook for Nigerian housewives in 1957, shortly before Nigerian independence. Among her suggestions for salt:
Salt is molded in some parts of Nigeria to make it last longer. This has to be scraped and crushed before it is used. The Yorubas use a kind of solid salt called iyo obu. They tie it in a piece of cloth and squeeze it in water. This is removed when it has seasoned the water sufficiently and is kept and re-used.
Africans became so accustomed to their impure salts, with specific tasks found for each blend, that when Europeans in the age of colonialism introduced pure sodium chloride, Africans mixed it with other salts to make salt compounds more to their liking.
CHAPTER THREE
Saltmen Hard as Codfish
IN 1666, THE Saltzburg Chronicle described the following incident:
In the year 1573, on the 13th of the winter month, a shocking comet-star appeared in the sky, and on the 26th of this month a man, 9 hand spans in length, with flesh, legs, hair, beard and clothing in a state of non-decay, although somewhat flattened, the skin a smoky brown color, yellow and hard like codfish, was dug out of the Tuermberg mountain 6300 shoe lengths deep and was laid out in front of the church for all to see. After a while, however, the body began to rot and was laid to rest.
He was found by salt miners in the Dürnberg mountain mine near the Austrian town of Hallein, a name which means “saltwork,” near Salzburg, which means “salt town.” The perfectly preserved body, dried and salted “like codfish,” was that of a bearded man with a pickax found near him, evidently a miner, wearing pants, a woolen jacket, leather shoes, and a cone-shaped felt hat. The bright colors of the patterned clothing—plaid twill with brilliant red—were striking, not only because of how well the salt conserved the colors but also because Europeans are not thought of as people dressed in such a flaming palate. In 1616, a similar body had been found in nearby Hallstatt, which also means “salt town.”
Inside these alpine mountains of salt, the weight of the rock overhead causes walls to shift, opening cavities and closing up shafts. Water running over the rock salt turns to brine, which then crystalizes, sealing over cracks. Three prehistoric miners have been found, trapped in their dark ancient work sites, and many tools, leather shoes, clothes in their original bright colors—the oldest color-preserved European textiles ever found—leather sacks for hauling rock salt on their backs, torches made of pine sticks bundled together and dipped in resin, and a horn possibly used to warn of cave-ins—all well preserved in salt. The bodies were dated to 400 B.C., but some of the objects found in the remains of a log cabin thatched-roof village on the mountainside may date back to 1300 B.C.
The colorfully dressed salt miners of Hallein were Celts. Celts did not illustrate their culture on temple walls as the Egyptians did; nor did they have chroniclers as the Greeks and Romans did. The guardians of Celtic culture, the Druids, did not leave written records. So most of what we know of them is from Greek and Roman historians who described the Celts as huge and terrifying men in bright fabrics. Aristotle described them as barbarians who went naked in the cold northern weather, abhorred obesity, and were hospitable to strangers. Diodorus, a Greek historian who lived in Sicily, wrote: “They are very tall in stature, with rippling muscles under clear white skin. Their hair is blond, but not naturally so. They bleach it, to this day artificially washing it in lime and combing it back from their foreheads. They look like wood demons, their hair thick and shaggy like a horse’s mane. Some of these are clean shaven, but others—especially those of high rank, shave their cheeks but leave a moustache that covers the whole of the mouth and, when they eat and drink, acts like a sieve, trapping particles of food.”
It is a sad fate for a people to be defined for posterity by their enemies. Even the name, Celt, is not from their own Indo-European language but from Greek. Keltoi, the name given to them by Greek historians, among them Herodotus, means “one who lives in hiding or under cover.” The Romans, finding them less mysterious, called them Galli or Gauls, also coming from a Greek word, used by Egyptians as well, hal, meaning “salt.” They were the salt people. The name of the town that sits on an East German salt bed, Halle, like the Austrian towns of Hallein, Swäbisch Hall, and Hallstatt, has the same root as do both Galicia in northern Spain and Galicia in southern Poland, where the town of Halych is found. All these places were named for Celtic saltworks.
Their land was in what is now Hungary, Austria, and Bavaria. The Rivers Rhine, Main, Neckar, Ruhr, and Isar are all thought to have been named by the Celts. Like the ancient Chinese emperors, they based their economy on salt and iron and so needed waterways to transport their heavy goods.
The Celts used rivers for trade and conquest. They moved west into France, south into northern Spain, and north into Belgium, named after a Celtic tribe, the Belgae. At the time that the mine shaft trapped the miner in Dürnberg, Celts were moving into the British Isles and the Mediterranean. In 390 B.C., the Celts sacked Rome, having traveled eighty miles in four days on horseback in an age when western Europeans had not seen mounted cavalry. They terrorized townspeople with their heavy swords and loud war cries. The Celts controlled Rome for the next forty years, and in 279 B.C., they invaded what is now Turkey.
Exactly how far in the world they traveled, settled, and traded is not certain. Until the nineteenth century, Western history generally dismissed the Celts as crude and frightening barbarians. But in 1846, a mining engineer named Johann Georg Ramsauer began looking for pyrite deposits in the area of the Hallstatt salt mine near Hallein. Instead he found two skeletons, an ax, and a piece of bronze jewelry. Then he discovered seven more bodies buried with valuables. He reported his findings to the government in Vienna and received funding from the curator of the imperial coin collection to continue digging. In one summer he found another 58 graves. In sixteen years he found 1,000 graves, both burials and cremation urns, and carefully cataloged thousands of objects. Numbering each grave, an artist made a watercolor record of the bodies and artifacts at each site. Ramsauer’s meticulous scientific methodology made him a pioneer in the new science of archaeology. In the process, a great deal was learned about the early salt-trading Celts. The Hallstatt Period became the archaeological name for a rich early Iron Age culture, beginning about 700 B.C. and lasting until 450 B.C.
Ramsauer’s Hallstatt graves were mostly from 700 to 600 B.C. , with some as late as 500 B.
C. The Dürnberg discoveries from 400 B.C. suggest that the Hallstatt mine began to diminish in importance as the Dürnberg one became a more important source of salt.
Ramsauer’s dig and the Dürnberg finds showed a society living off of salt mining, secluded on remote and rugged mountains at an altitude of 3,000 feet, and yet trading to the far ends of the continent. These people were buried with valuable possessions from the Mediterranean, from North Africa, even from the Near East. Ramsauer’s investigation of these salt miners began to challenge the perception of northern Europe’s Iron Age barbarians.
ONLY IN THE 1990s did Westerners become aware of the mummies that had been found in the Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. They had been discovered in and near the Tarim Basin, west of Tibet, east of Samarkand and Tashkent, between China and central Asia along the Silk Road, the principal trade route between the Mediterranean and Beijing. It was the road of Marco Polo, but these people had lived more than three millennia earlier, about 2000 B.C. As with the early Egyptian burials that are 1,000 years older, the corpses had been preserved by the naturally salty soil.
The condition of the bodies and their bright colored clothing was spectacular. The men wore leggings striped in blue, ochre, and crimson. They appeared to be tall with blond or light brown hair, sometimes red beards, and the women’s hair woven in long blond braids. These unknown people were in appearance notably similar to the large blue-eyed blond Celtic warriors described by the Romans almost two millennia later. Their conical felt hats and twill jackets bore a close resemblance to those of the salt miners in Hallein and Hallstatt—not unlike the much later plaids of the Scottish Highlands. The red-and-blue pinstripes were almost identical to fabrics found in the Dürnberg mine. Textile historian Elizabeth Wayland Barber concluded that even the weave was nearly identical workmanship. Why Celts might have been in the salty desert of Asia many centuries before there were known to be Celts remains a mystery.
In the centuries when the Celtic culture was documented, beginning 1,300 years after these seemingly Celtic bodies were buried in Asian salt, they did trade and travel great distances, usually selling salt from their rich central European mines. Like the Egyptians, they learned that it was not as profitable to trade and transport salt as salted foods.
According to the Greeks and Romans, who not only wrote about Celts but traded Mediterranean products for their salt and salt products, Celts ate a great deal of meat, both wild and domesticated. Salted meat was a Celtic specialty.
When the Romans finally succeeded in imposing their culture on the Celts, Moccus, which means “pig,” was the Celtic name for the god Mercury. The Celts did not mean it unkindly. To the pig-loving Celts, the leg of wild boar was considered the choicest piece of meat and was reserved for warriors. With domesticated pigs also, according to Strabo, the first-century-B.C. Greek historian, the Celts preferred the legs. It is likely that among the Celtic contributions to Western culture are the first salt-cured hams.
Athenaeus, a first-century-A.D. Greek living in Rome, wrote that the Celts most valued the upper part of the ham, which was reserved for the bravest warrior. If two warriors claimed rights to this cut, the dispute would be settled by combat. Fighting over the ham may be more the Greco-Roman view of Celts than the reality. But the Celts certainly made, traded, and ate hams.
Among the few remaining Celtic cultures, this tradition of savoring a salt-cured leg from the hunt endures. An example is Scottish salted haunch of venison.
Take the venison to be salted after it has hung in the larder for two days. Cut it into pieces the required size. See that it is clean and free from fly, but on no account wash it with water [her italics]. Take 2 pounds kitchen salt, one quarter pound demerara sugar, 1 teaspoon black pepper, one half teaspoon nitre [natron]. Mix these well together. Rub pieces of venison on every side with this mixture for 2–3 days in succession. Then place them in a wooden tub, or earthenware jar, and press them well together. After 10 days the venison is ready for use. Venison treated in this way, if pressed into a jar and the air excluded, should keep for months, and a haunch which has been well salted in this manner for about three weeks can be hung up to dry as a ham.—Margaret Fraser, A Highland Cookery Book, 1930
According to Annette Hope, an Edinburgh librarian who collected Scottish recipes, Margaret Fraser came from a family of gamekeepers on a Highland estate, and most of her recipes were for venison, though the same ideas may have been used for legs of other game and domestic meat. The sugar—she specified the light brown of Demerara, British Guiana—would not have been used by original Celts, but the natron may have been.
THE EARLY CELTIC salt miners understood their mountains. They realized that horizontal shafts from the mountainside, though a great deal easier to travel and move rock through, would require far more digging to reach the rich salt deposits. Instead they dug at steep angles and skillfully shored up the shafts. The miners had to climb out, flaming torch clenched in their teeth, leather back sack loaded with rock, at forty-five- or fifty-degree angles. Though the master ironworkers of their age, they made their picks and other metal tools out of bronze, the antiquated metal of a more primitive era. They seem to have learned that bronze would not be corroded by salt the way iron is.
The Celts, or their central European ancestors known as the Urnfield people, because they cremated their dead and buried them in urns, had many innovations besides those in salt mining. They developed the first organized agriculture in northern Europe, experimenting with such revolutionary ideas as fertilizer and crop rotation. They introduced wheat to northern Spain. They were sophisticated bronze casters, skilled iron miners and forgers. They introduced to much of western Europe iron and their many iron inventions, including chain armor and the feared Celtic sword, which was three feet long. But they also invented the seamless iron rim for wagon wheels, the barrel, and possibly the horseshoe. They may have been the first Europeans to ride horses.
One thing the Celts were not advanced in was statecraft. Ironically, the closest the Celts ever came to fusing into a nation was in the first century when Julius Caesar conquered Gaul. A Celtic leader named Vercingetorix, which means “warrior king,” gathered warriors from the diverse Celtic groups to face the Romans at Alesia, now Alise-Sainte Reine on the lower Seine. Vercingetorix’s father had attempted the same thing unsuccessfully in 80 B.C.
According to Caesar, while besieged Celts were so desperate that they were debating whether to eat the elderly noncombatants, forty-one Celtic tribes responded to Vercingetorix’s call by sending a relief column to Alesia of 8,000 horsemen and 250,000 foot soldiers.
Some historians believe that had the Celts won at Alesia, it would have been the beginning of a united Celtic nation. But the Romans won and subjugated the Celts and wrote their history.
Despite the fame of their bright clothing, Celts are described going naked into battle except for horned helmets. We are told that they had frightening war cries and that the terrifying songs of their ancesters were preludes to violent attacks. They fought, the Romans said, with a furor. And they swooped off heads with their large iron swords and hung these trophies on their houses or strung them along the horse bridle. Vercingetorix was apparently a ruthless leader, a fanatic obsessed with freeing his people from the Romans, willing to destroy entire towns and ruthlessly level opponents to achieve his goal.
Gold stater of the Avernes tribe with the face of Apollo and the inscription “Vercingetorixs.” The Granger Collection
But he was trying to stand up to the Roman legions of Julius Caesar. The Roman historian Plutarch estimated that the civilized Romans under Julius Caesar, in his decade-long campaign in Gaul, destroyed 800 towns and villages and enslaved 3 million people.
After the Roman campaigns were over, all that remained of Celtic life were isolated groups on the far Atlantic coasts: northwestern Iberia, the Brittany peninsula, the Cornish tip of England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man. All of these groups were treated by the chroniclers
of later nation-states as recalcitrant people interfering with the building of great states—Britain, France, or Spain.
The Roman victory had been total. Celtic inventions—in salt mining, iron, agriculture, trade, horsemanship—enriched the Roman Empire. Celtic salt mines became part of Roman wealth, and Celtic hams became part of the Roman diet with few ever remembering that such things were once Celtic. The Celts were innovators. The Romans were nation builders.
CHAPTER FOUR
Salt’s Salad Days
THE ROMANS PAID homage to democracy, the rights of the common citizen and, for a time, republicanism. But they rarely lived up to any of these ideals. Roman history is the chronic struggle between the privileged patricians and the disenfranchised plebeians. Plebeians fought to have a voice, and patricians endeavored to keep them excluded. The Roman patrician often tried to keep his privileges by offering lesser rights to plebeians. In this spirit, patricians insisted that every man had a right to salt. “Common salt,” as it has come to be known, was a Roman concept.
Patricians ate an elaborate cuisine that expressed opulence in ingredients and presentation. Roman cooks seemed to avoid leaving anything in its natural state. They loved the esoteric, such as sow’s vulva and teats, a dish that is frequently mentioned for banquets and which provoked a debate as to whether it should be from a virgin sow or, as Pliny the Elder suggested, one whose first litter was aborted.
Sometimes the cuisine emphasized local pride. The best pike had to be caught in the Tiber between the city bridges of Rome. But food was also a way to boast of conquest, with hams from Germania, oysters from Britannia, and sturgeon from the Black Sea. Meanwhile, plebeians ate coarse bread, cereals, a little salt fish, and olives. And the government made certain they had salt.
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