“To Be Taken With a Pinch of Salt: The Destruction of Carthage”, 1986-04-01 (; backlinks):
…It seems that this sowing of the ruins of Carthage with salt, apparently as a symbol of its total destruction and perhaps as a means of ensuring the soil’s infertility, is a tradition in Roman history well known to most students. When, however, one comes to seek the source, it seems elusive.
…Since the ancient sources for the salt story are lacking, its origin must be sought in modern works…Who, then, has told the story of the salt? The earliest version I have found is highly notable: the Cambridge Ancient History. In 1930, B. Hallward wrote:
Buildings and walls were razed to the ground; the plough passed over the site, and salt was sown in the furrows made.
From here the story can be traced step by step. Following Hallward come H. Scullard, G. Walter, G. Picard, B. Warmington, S. Raven, G. Herm, S. Tlatli. As the story is handed down, details are added or changed: the spreading of salt was meant to consecrate the site eternally as cursed (Walter) or “to signify that it was to remain uninhabited and barren forever” (Warmington), or “to make the soil unfruitful” (Herm). The spreading or “sowing” of salt (Scullard, Picard, Warmington) even becomes finally a more genteel “sprinkling” (Raven). The modern origin of the story seems, then, to have been the influential Cambridge Ancient History,2 a chapter written by a young historian who wrote hardly anything else. So few words have rarely had such an influence!
This still does not reveal the ultimate source of the story. That is another paradox. It must be Judges 9:45, a famous biblical crux…Here we have a clutch of Jewish, Hittite, and Assyrian texts ranging over nearly one and a half millennia which describe the scattering of a variety of minerals and plants over the site of a destroyed city or land, in one case salt alone (Shechem), in another salt and some form of plant (Elam). The common link joining all these instances is the desire to render the site uninhabitable. The best-known case, of course, is that of Shechem, since it occurs in the Old Testament.
Here, then, must be the origin of the idea that Carthage also was sown with salt.
Now, more than 50 years after its first appearance in Roman histories, it is time to excise it—along with the ploughing up of the whole site—from the tradition.
There is a bizarre recent note on the consecratio of Carthage. In 1966 there was published what purports to be an old inscription concerning this act, restored ad formam tituli et litterarum by a procurator Augusti, Classicius: see CRAI (196658ya): 61–76. As soon as the inscription was presented to the Academy, it was pronounced a forgery by L. Robert, J. Carcopino, and others, because of aberrant grammar, letter-forms, forms of proper names, and, not least, the suggestive name of the restorer: ‘Classicius’!