What is a salt road? A salt road is a road that was used in ancient times to transport salt from where it was produced to where it was needed.
We don’t think about salt so much these days. Maybe if our meal is a bit bland we might reach for the salt cellar and add a sprinkle, but other than that, I doubt many of us spare much thought for salt. Well, that hasn’t always been the case. Salt used to be extremely valuable and was once a currency in its own right. It has never been as valuable as gold, but it has certainly had a very high value. At some times in history, it was used as a currency and was worth a lot of money. The expression “worth one’s salt” has come from a time when salt was a lot more valuable. There is also a myth that the word salary comes from the practice of giving salt to Roman soldiers as payment. This is not actually true, but it is undeniable that the words salary and salt do share the same route. Salt had been used as a currency, so it is not impossible to believe that at some point in history, people were paid in salt. It just wasn’t Roman soldiers. Salt was expensive for three reasons: preserving food, tax, and its manufacturing process.
Before people had refrigerators, and when they didn’t have access to ice or ice boxes, there were not many ways to preserve food. You could dry it, pickle in in vinegar, pickle it in sugar, ferment it, or salt it. The most common way was salting the food because it was the fastest. All you have to do is pack meat or vegetables in salt and leave it. That meant a lot of salt was necessary. The average person used about 50 kg of salt a year to preserve their food. They didn’t eat all of it. The salt was scraped off before the salted food was eaten. However, because it was one of the best ways of preserving food, salt became extremely valuable.
As with anything that people need to buy, salt was taxed by a lot of different governments. The first recorded salt tax was by China in 300 BC, and it was actually how the Great Wall of China was paid for. Most major countries have had a salt tax at one point or another and they have provided a lot of money for those countries, but they have also caused a lot of resentment. Several revolutions, including the French Revolution, were partly caused by a tax on salt.
The third reason salt was expensive was because of the way it was manufactured. Salt was either created by evaporating sea water, or through mining. In ancient times, mining salt was not as easy as it is today. It was too difficult to tunnel deep enough into the ground. Salt mining was also dangerous because the salt would dehydrate the workers and it got into their bodies and gave them high blood pressure, which caused strokes and heart attacks. Being sent to the salt mines was a not uncommon punishment. It was difficult to make salt in extremely large quantities, which kept the price high. The price started to drop as salt mines became more effective.
So, what is a salt road? Before salt mines were discovered, most salt was made by evaporating seawater, which meant the production area had to be close to the sea. It could be done in large pans, or it could be done by boiling the salt water. Salt roads were built to get that important salt from where it was produced to where it was needed, in the cities. Trade routes have always been necessary, but the idea of having a route purely for the trading of salt is strange to us. The Via Salaria, a salt road heading from Rome to the mouth of the Tiber. Interestingly, the Via Salaria was used to bring salt into Rome from the marshes by the river Tiber where it was made, but it was then shipped on out of Rome. Early Rome, before it became the center of the known world, was actually built on salt. The Via Salaria started at the Porta Salaria, which was the port where the salt was brought into Rome.
Rome wasn’t the only country to have salt roads. Almost any country that produced salt ended up with a dedicated road to transport the salt. A lot of these salt roads still exist, or a road with the name salt in it still exists. My hometown of Droitwich was a famous center of salt production and the Saltway leads out of the town. The price of salt stayed pretty high until the Industrial Revolution. Steam engines meant mines could be pumped and dug deeper than before, improving salt mining. Salt could be transported in much larger quantities by trains or ships as well. And this is what I learned today.
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Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_road
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via_Salaria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_tax
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/448865/is-the-etymology-of-salary-a-myth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_salt
https://www.etymonline.com/word/salt
Photo by Julia Volk: https://www.pexels.com/photo/salty-walls-and-lamps-in-cave-of-mine-5207320/