Salt (8 page)

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, including 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.

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

I
N 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.