Salt and salary: Were Roman soldiers paid in salt? (2017)
kiwihellenist.blogspot.com
kiwihellenist.blogspot.com
1. According to the "Pay in the Roman army", Wikipedia [0]: in 235AD, a legionary was paid about 1350 denarii per year.
2. I cannot find the price of salt in Wikipedia, but according to the "Roman goods prices" [1]: in 301AD, price of salt was capped to 100 denarii for about 17 liters of salt. It was capped because of inflation, so it is reasonable to assume it was not higher in 235AD.
This means that in salt, a legionary would have to be paid with around 230 liters of salt per year. If paid weekly, it's about 4.5 liters of salt per week.
If the numbers are correct, this is indeed completely unrealistic. No one needs 4 liters of salt per week, a legionary wouldn't carry 8kg of salt on top of his equipment, and where would all that salt come from? This raises many more questions for centurions, who had roughly 30 times bigger salaries.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_(Roman_army) [1] https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/roman-economy/roman-goods-pric...
Back in the day people used a lot more salt than we do.[0]
Before refrigeration, salting (brining) was the primary method of preserving meat and fish in damp climates. Salt was used to treat olives for consumption. Butter and cheese were stored in barrels surrounded by layers of salt to prevent spoilage. Soft cheeses like feta were often brined as well. Salt was used to cure hides for leathermaking. Salt was used in cloth dyeing. There are probably other uses that haven't sprung to mind immediately.
Note that these things are home production if the soldier has a farm, and a soldier's family would have been six people or so.
Maybe they could make do with less than 200 liters a year. If they were economical with it.
> where would all that salt come from?
Salt mines. The Austrian city Salzburg is called that because of the salt mines there. Hallstatt had salt mines from prehistoric times, and in the modern day several dead prehistoric miners have been recovered from the mines. they were preserved by the salt.
The phrase "back to the salt mines", meaning returning to an arduous job, exists because salt mining was hard and dangerous. It was usually done by slaves or condemned criminals. If there were an easier way to get the salt that was needed, people would have used it.
0. Actually this probably isn't true. It's just that all the salt used in making the the products and services we consume is hidden from us in far-away factories. Ed Conway's book Material World has a couple of chapters on salt.
Nobody needed 4-10kg salt per day (what a semi-skilled labourer and above could supposedly afford by ~300AD). The cost of salt by volume was about the same as wheat. So it was very cheap. Due to the bulkininess it was one of the worst medium of exchange someone could imagine. Just try to imagine having to transport to all the places where the army was stationed in. Absurd..
> Before refrigeration, salting (brining) was the primary method of preserving meat and fish in damp climates. Salt was used to treat olives for consumption
Yes. Not something legionaries probably engaged that much themselves in. Also their diet (just like everyone else's) was mainly grain based.
> Maybe they could make do with less than 200 liters a year. If they were economical with it.
I don't think this claim can be substantiated at all.
I couldn't find soldier salaries for ~300 AD but for semi-skilled labourers by it might have been up to 7 liters per day. The 4 per week figures seems to be based by using salaries from the early to mid 200 and price from 300 AD which is probably inaccurate considering there was significant inflation in that period.
In any case as far as we can tell the price of salt by volume was equivalent to that of wheat. Soldiers couldn't have been paid the equivalent (in coins not salt) of 4 liters of wheat per week.
> have been made to the home/family of the soldier rather shipped out to them personally.
I doubt soldiers generally had families in living far away from where they were station and nobody paid them in salt anyway.
I'm not disagreeing with you entirely, I do agree that salt was an important preservate in Rome and before that, but maybe not to the extent that 4 litres per week would be practical for most people.
I was making the points that before refrigeration, a lot more salt was used for food storage, and that salt has other major uses besides flavoring food or providing necessary physiological electrolyte. As Ed Conway writes, the production of some important industrial chemicals starts with salt.
I'm also not claiming that legionaries were literally paid in salt. I don't believe that would have been true after the very early Republic at the latest. Probably not after the first kings. The Roman genius for bureaucracy and record-keeping would have sorted out a more efficient payment system quite soon, I believe.
A lot more practical than kilos of salt.
There was massive inflation (by premodern standards) during those 70 years. The price edicts also caps the wages of semi skilled labourers at 50 denarii per DAY. So an ordinary person could supposedly buy 10kg of salt every day (of course in reality it must have been more expensive but the income-cost ratio in the edict might still be semi accurate).
Isn't the same true for pay in denarii? Based on what Wikipedia says about denarii those 1350 denarii per year would be just over 118 g of silver per week. No one needs 118 g of silver per week.
118g of silver which can easily be traded with just about anyone for anything.
Or 4800g of salt, which has a low liquidity and can be consumed (at ~20g max/day) or used to preserve foods.
Silver, of course. The comment I was responding to made that point and other great points against salt as pay all of which I agree with.
But it also asserted that salt would not be good pay because the amount of salt in a week's pay would be more salt than you need. My point is that one specific point of their argument is wrong. That's why in my reply I quoted that specific part of their argument and nothing else.
You need a variety of things to get by: food, water, shelter, clothes, and fuel for a few examples.
Unless you have a job where your pay consists of the employer actually giving you all those things you are going to want to trade your pay with others for those things. If the physical form your weekly pay takes is something that you actually use then it needs to be more than you use in a week so you will have some left over to trade for those other things.
Hence their argument that 4 liters of salt a week is more than you could personally use fails as an argument against salt as pay.
While you're correct that it's not impossible, it's logically backwards enough for us to say it probably didn't happen. And, to corroborate that, there are no historical accounts of the former beyond some colloquial offhanded remarks. I've seen family mention they're bringing home the bread before, are they being paid in bread?
No refrigeration. No freezing. No canning.
They used a lot of salt.
They also had cellars and natural refrigerators.
As it would imply price to be very high. Which then would mean that regular people would not have access. But they also widely used salt. So it could not have been extremely valuable as we understand. Or maybe gasoline is extremely valuable commodity now...
Salt production and trade have been restricted, usually state-owned monopoly. Cities with salt mines like Salzburg became extremely rich, like oil countries today.
Is gasoline valuable? Yes. Is affordable? Yes, but not for everyone. Same with salt back than.
That isn't possible; someone who can't afford salt dies. It's like claiming that water "isn't affordable for everyone". It is, and it must be, because people who can't afford it also can't exist.
Comparisons are very hard, but to put that in a bit of perspective: at an average salary of $60k/yr, a typical American today makes $165/day. So the cost in time for a Roman to buy salt would be roughly equivalent to if the price for salt today were $11/lb.
That's more expensive than it is today (I just bought salt for ~$2.50/lb), but it's a far cry from extremely valuable.
An Army private starts at, $1,833/mo that’s 21k/year. Even corporal is only getting $2,393/mo to start and cap at $2,906/mo w/ 10 years. https://www.military-ranks.org/army-pay
So a modern soldier starts at ~24lb/day of your 2.50$/lb salt, but also has much cheaper alternatives.
You’re right about the wages, but single soldiers live on base (no housing costs) and are also fed (no food costs).
That’s $1,833 per month is all discretionary which is why you hear the stories of 18 year old privates buying a new <insert fast car>. A $800/month car payment is no problem with plenty left over.
And once you get married you can live off base and a Basic Housing Allowance. If stationed in San Francisco (unlikely, but a good example), you get $3,177/month as an E-2 (Private 2nd class).
You get even more money with kids.
Then add on top a full pension after 20 years and full healthcare coverage through the VA.
Overall military pay is actually quite high.
And you need to carry the salt. That's it. Salt can't rot and it's needed everywhere; this is just about the easiest piece of commerce you can do.
And salt was not only flavoring, but one of the few means of preserving food. Access to salt was not a mere culinary issue, it was a matter of survival. This means that there was substantial trade, and substantial value in salt production and trade.
Agree Northern Europe would be tough, but there are plentiful salt ponds in Vietnam where the humidity (plus the rain) would make one think evaporation would be challenging, but apparently it works.
What really made it special was that it was commodity with possibly limited production locations, that kept extremely well and was in steady demand. So it is one thing that everyone uses and is relatively easy to tax. And the price likely was much more stable compared to food and other goods.
The large scale demand also lead to it being desirable as military target, once you control the production you are good.
The reality was just that making salt is an unpleasant, labor intensive task. In the Roman era, this involved slaves and thus capital.
Salt was one of the most important goods that were traded over long distances. And no, technologically it wasn't advantageous to transport seawater or try to convert seawater into salt. Ukrainian city of Soledar that was prominently featured in the news last year literally means "gifting salt" -- and it has huge historical salt mines under it.
So, not only in antiquity, all the way through to the 19th century salt was one of the key goods traded over long distances. It wasn't as scarce as diamonds, but due to high demand it was still a worthwhile thing to trade.
Maybe there's a good reason for the bacon thing, or maybe some guy just tended to buy bacon on payday. /shrug
"It sounds cool and kids' parents hate it" goes back to at least the 50s. It's an arms race of kids/teens trying to invent their own slang that their parents won't understand and then that language being picked up in popular culture and becoming more widely used and then kids try to come up with new terms.
(We had a lot of fun with "yeet," "hype," "been knew," and a few others with my kids a few years ago.)
Most on-line sources claim the phrase originated in 1104 in a small town in Essex, England.
In the third paragraph the author states he prefers the boxer story.
Personally, I think the usage of that idiom is older than 117 years.
Because of the dampness, there's no turf to speak of
and now we have nothing to burn.
This sounds a bit less serious to modern American ears than it should. We think of winter as being annoying, not dangerous.
In China, where a common word for wages is 薪资 -- "fuel and resources" -- people are more likely to intuit that going without fuel is best not attempted, even though they've never experienced it either. It makes for an odd example of poetry coming across better in translation than it does in the original language.
Of course, that's a fringe theory. The most mainstream one is that the copper coins people used for pennies would develop a patina of verdigris and would look, like the Statue of Liberty, green.
If you’re wondering why salt was so mythologically important, just go over to your counter, put some salt in your hand, lick it, and try to imagine how you’d describe the taste to someone who’s never tasted it before. You can’t. Salt is its own thing and there’s nothing else like it.
However, saltiness is not actually limited to NaCl. The part that triggers the taste is the Na ion, and other similar ions actually trigger the same taste - KCl is the most common, but compounds from Li, Rb, Cs, Ca can all trigger salty tastes.
I like the article for sticking to the textual evidence we have and concluding "we don't know" instead of speculating.
However if you have anything concrete on the religious meaning of salt in Ancient Rome that would be interesting.
It would be funny to see my payslip with a tex deductable section saying "Salt allowance". Imagine if modern day employers paid their employees in other things rather than currency that were tangibly valuable (would be chaos I am sure).
Also, coal mine workers in my country used to get few tons of coal once a year (useful for heating their homes in winter).
Unfortunately, for tax purposes your employer is supposed to calculate a cash value of those bonuses, so you don't actually pay your tax in sausage.
I can vividly imagine your wife's flatmates joy once a quarter so!
You are the owner here not a guest.
(c) Rough translation of USSR joke.
As highlighted in other comments, this happens all the time. For example there are huge tax benefits to getting paid in “non-taxable” ways.
If everyone gets a ton of free beer anyway, then most people won't be tempted to nick some booze.
Making it tax-free makes some sense, because nicking the booze is also tax-free.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meal_voucher
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEurope/comments/793aud/are_meal_...
As for wages of ancient soldiers, the Greeks (dunno about Romans) took spoils, including women and slaves.
This is also why Gatorade is salted.
Considering their diets, which were very high in carbohydrates (not sugars though) compared to modern diets that seems highly unlikely. Can you actually ever enter "ketosis" if you're mainly eating bread and other grain products?
> i think ancient people needed salt because they would get sick without it. but eveyone says its because they liked the taste
They needed salt because there weren't that many other ways to preserve food. I doubt this has much to do with taste. Also modern people need salt too..
> ancient people didnt eat as much
That's debatable. According to our records medieval people did sometimes eat quite a lot. I guess the problem is that it varied a lot. You either had too much or to little food all of the time.
Why? Of course Northern European had different diets (e.g. lard instead of olive oil etc.) but on the Mediterranean cost diets weren't that similar.
> you can enter ketosis every day on a diet of carbohydrates by eating one or two times a day
So being on the brink of starvation all the time? Does not seem sustainable.
> all of this could have applied to most people until relatively recently
Highly unlikely. What makes you think that was the case?
> had almost none of the diseases we have that are all really metabolic dysfunction/diabetes at their root
True. Unless you were rich. Even heard of gout? But yeah probably somewhat accurate for the whole population. But again, not much to do with ketosis.
I mean is there any evidence even today that someone whose diet is primarily (~80%) grain and other plant products with a lot of carbohydrates can enter ketosis even when practicing "intermittent fasting" while consuming ~2000-3000 calories per day (e.g. the estimate for standard Roman soldier daily rations is 3,000-4,000)? Seems impossible...
> its extremely well established science
You saying this doesn't make it true.
Not sure what you mean by that - at a time when people were largely self-sufficient and working the land, they obviously consumed enough calories for the work they were doing. The food may not have been great (a lot of bread!), but there would generally have been enough of it unless having to tough out the winter after a poor harvest.
There is extensive original literature on Roman soldiers, I've read a few by myself.
Except they didn't use salt for that. That's a myth. Did you read the article?
> the lack of fiat currency as the reserves of silver and gold were exhausted.
True, they had the same problem in the middle ages. Since we know massively more about the middle ages than Ancient Rome AFAIK they partially solved it through a mix of barter and credit (accounting was done using currency bit might have never changed hands in reality). As long as most trade is local that must be a pretty effective system.
.e.g according to Diocletian's price edict (so the prices themselves are probably not accurate due to inflation by ratios might be) a laborer could afford to buy ~7kg of salt for his daily wage.
Salt was supposedly very cheap, actually the same price as grain by volume. So it really wouldn't have made much sense to drag bags of salts with you just to sell it for pennies (salted meats or fish etc. probably would've have been a much better option).
Education system failure.
"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
"Later on, Scheller and Freund realised that Pliny didn’t say what Facciolati-Forcellini claimed he did, but they liked the idea so they instead supported it"
I wonder, how many historical so-called facts are similarly based on a whim of some historiographer or other? We should take everything with a grain of salary... I mean, salt. :)
Trusting experts is a problem, because experts are human.
It's rather curious how many high skill professions seem to default to trusting others based on their credentials.
The first example that comes to my mind is the Tuskegee experiment, where the US public health service and CDC allowed 100 of the 400 men in their study to die, refusing to provide them with treatment for syphilis and preventing them from getting treatment by other means, so they could study the men. They also never revealed to those men that they had syphilis.
and uk https://www.ballardsbutchers.co.uk/sites/default/files/style...
note differences in cleanliness, refrigeration and so on.
There is the show "Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern" in which he ate weird stuff around the globe. He mentioned across several interviews that he never got sick on one of his trips by mostly just staying away from stuff like known bad tap water.
At the same time he had gotten food poisoning 4 times in the last decade in the US. Including
>Worst case was in Portland, Maine eating mussels at a crappy restaurant that I shouldn't have been eating in in the first place. On the road, in the third and fourth world I have not gotten sick.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230607121840/https://starcasm....
If i recall his rule of thumb is that if the local grandmas eat there and they dont use stuff you have to be exposed to for a while to tolerate it (rotten food / tap water in India) you are good to go.
If they were, we'd have rates of food poisoning close to Nepal's. But we don't. Obviously laws have to be enforced, with checks and all, but they largely work.
Same for tap water: when it's handled following expert-based rules, you don't need to stay away from it. Sure, some can build resistance by repeated exposure, but not everyone; and anyway we don't need to, if we employ the scientific knowledge we built over centuries. It's like saying that births will happen even without expert assistance: sure, but chances that stuff will go horribly wrong are dramatically higher.
You can get food poisoning in the first world by over relying on regulation when you should have known better and you can avoid getting food poisoning in the third world by applying common sense. As long as you can afford to which most people there cant. If tainted water is all you got, you will get sick.
We are making different types of arguments, being able to lower the overall risk doesnt mean common sense / "rule of look" is worthless. Nor does it become worthless in an unregulated environment.
At best you can be confident / trust that a product is created in a given process which manages certain risks through certain means.
Also, finding faults in said process is a lot easier then coming up with it or executing it. Be it making a sausage that is unlikely to make you sick or coming to an expert judgement with sufficient confidence to act on.
It doesnt require the ability to validate a process to find it faulty, you just have to detect an error case occurring that isnt dealt with.
Asking experts to provide rationale for their decisions should be welcomed by experts.
The whole expert thing becomes really problematic once people start making circular arguments to justify their existence and then promptly overrely. So the perceived necessity or benefit of having an expert means there has to be somebody you can trust. Which you then promptly overdo without functioning checks and balances.
Expertise cant stem from demonstrated conviction and cant require trust, thats is describing religion and Ponzi schemes. You arent doing experts any favor by treating them as such, at best they still all have incomplete expertise and cant shoulder your reckless levels of trust.
The problem is less that those crucial facts are not know, but rather that they get ignored in public discourse.
Plenty of groups believe/ promote all kinds of "weird theories". As long as they are harmless I dont care. The moment it involves cutting baby penisses or promoting hate I'm voicing myself out against.
One real attack August 2, one confused incident where actually no attack happened.
It's kind of true but really it's hardly a false flag operation
(paraphrasing and being kind to US administration - US Navy breached territorial waters, exchanged fire on Aug 2, then on Aug 4 they fired upon radar returns and possible signals traffic. The second time there was no actual North Vietnamese and the Navy expressed doubts but US administration wanted to escalate and both incidents became conflated. It's not the same as for example pre-planned false flag operations. Is there a fine line? Yes. exactly where that is is hard to say.
Not sure what's worse.
And see the result: how many dead Viets? I recently heard a US TV anchor say "all civilian deaths since WW2" (they meant to say "US civ deaths").
The Iraqi WMDs were a similar hoax to get "involved". I never trust a word 3 letter agencies again: professional lairs with zero accountability.
These are congruent accounts with different interpretations, and I tend to believe public speakers are opportunistic spin doctors, not world-shaping conspirators.
As for "never trust a 3 letter agency", that's quite an extreme viewpoint. CDC? EPA? FBI? CIA? NSA? All of them do good, even if their findings can be spun ( or are even directed to be spun ).
What do you think is the good? Maybe the FBI to some extend (my point was quite a hyperbole I know). But under the line they mostly do bad imho. And they spin their own "findings", that's how we got into this conversation.
I the plan was to invade Vietnam/Iraq, and the attack are propped up to "allow" then to invade. If you think they govt was deceived by it's own speakers, that to my is quite a stretch... The plan was to invade, and the story was made to match. That is a conspiracy in and of itself.
Saddam Hussein was a mass murderer who had murdered around 400 000 people - half of them after US refused to take him down after the Gulf War. Any excuse to get him removed was a good one.
And no, removing Saddam with good reason was a really bad idea...
To cut it short, in the frame on the war on terror 4.5 million people died, almost a million directly related to the war and 38 million people displaced. If you think all that was a just price to pay to get Saddam and Bin-Laden, because the Taliban pretty much won, you should re-adjust your moral compass.
>could have
Do you have a rule of thumb how many deaths you are willing to accept and risk on what probabilities for which futures? Also, you used the term sociopaths, do you consider yourself a psychopath?
I based my argument based on reduction of human suffering.
Now please, buzz off.
edit: Thank you for your response none the less.
https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/how-us-secret-war-laos-st...
"From 1964 to 1973, the United States bombed Laos more heavily than any country on earth. The reason most Americans do not know this is because it was a secret war orchestrated by the CIA; it stands as the largest covert CIA operation to date."
"One team can find anywhere from three to 16 bombs in a day. The UXO Lao’s 2015 annual report states that since 1996, 1.4 million UXO have been cleared in Laos by a combined effort of UXO Lao and other UXO-clearing organizations, like MAG International. At this rate, it will take thousands of years before Laos is free of UXO."
"Forty percent of UXO victims are children who pick up the bombs, usually thinking they are toys."
The US cluster bombs. Now also in Ukraine:
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/20/politics/ukraine-cluster-...
US didn't bomb Laos, it bombed Vietnamese Communists covertly operating in and from Laos against Republic of Vietnam and US. The reason that it was a covert war was geopolitical - every actor there operated covertly.
In my country we still find ordnance from WW2 or even WW1. I even had some close encounters.
It looks like some early training of children can save lives. What I can read from https://laos.worlded.org/projects/uxo-education-and-awarenes... is that the education is mainly addressed toward primary school children meaning that the children below the age of 6 will not receive any education (from the program, perhaps there are other programs). What is completely lacking is education of parents.
Now what about cluster bombs in Ukraine?
These have been proven to be highly effective against Russian attacks.
If we talk about future safety concerns then Russian forces have laid mines over vast areas. The density can be as much as 5 mines per square meter and I doubt that they will share the mining maps when this eventually ends (if they even have systematic maps). Already the area affected by the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam by Russians has mines randomly scattered all over the area because of massive flooding.
Ukraine is keeping track of its cluster munition usage and the low percentage of unexploded munitions is a mere drop against the mayhem Russia has created.
Keep in mind that Russia has very clearly declared its genocidal goals.
BTW, have you heard of the Maine?
Somehow people just read an interesting book and decided that their great-grandparents all believed on that stupid thing.
They were right, too, as the size of the planet was pretty accurately known. He just lucked out that someone had left a continent for him to run into.
And in fact, such stories are not that uncommon at the 18. Century. Thinkers and scientists were fighting against the church, and they made up many fake stories to show how stupid and dangerous the church is. And AFAIK the church believing in a flat earth was one of them.
But it wouldn’t be fair to say that’s what our “culture” believes to be true.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/aug/energy-demands-limit-our...
Not saying that only X% of our brain is being used, but what it essentially says is that our brain is power-limited, and therefore, it has to be selective in which parts to "turn on". It makes a lot of sense, there are few things in life more important than energy and power management, and human brains already need lots of both.
We call that an epileptic seizure. :)
I can't recommend literature, a probably source is in medical textbook.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/seizure/sympt...
There are plenty of cultures from 2000+ years ago that never bothered thinking about the shape of Earth. I don't know of any that did bother and decided it was flat (and would really like a pointer), even though I do know of some ambiguous texts that people keep interpreting as that, but are much better explained as they not caring about the shape.
It's quite hard to do astronomy on a larger area than a single city and not discover the planet isn't flat. And it looks like people have been exchanging astronomic findings over some longish distances for longer than they have been writing texts that we can read today.
For those, we don't have any kind of indicator what they believed about earths shape, so why do they matter?
The way you phrased your comment indicated that you kinda believe that now one at any point in early history really believed in a flat earth, and it's all just a story made up later.
Semitic cultures very much believed the Earth was more or less a disc-like shape that consisted of the known world (mostly in their sphere of influence, if you pardon the expression). But they also had some other ideas, like that of chaotic universal waters above and below the Earth, separated by the firmament, and supported by pillars (though you can see this idea changing somewhat by the time the book of Job was written). This is a theme that is repeated in Genesis, Isaiah, Job, and one or more of the Psalms.
Not coincidentally, it's fairly well established in the scholarly literature that this was the view of ancient Near Eastern writers, and it wasn't until Young Earth Creationists decided to apply a degree of scientific concordism to the text where we get a more distorted view of Hebrew words like hûg inferring something other than a disc or circular inscription. It's true that they probably didn't care so much about the shape (unlike us), but their cosmology is definitely inferred rather strongly in the biblical texts (and in some cases from their neighbors). John Walton's "Lost World" series on Genesis are a good pointer in this direction, but I'd also suggest the IVP Bible Background Commentary (Walton is a contributor) which certainly touches on this motif and draws upon other creation accounts such as those in the Ugaritic tablets, Baal Cycle, etc. The late Dr. Michael Heiser has a great lecture series you can find on YT talking about biblical cosmology that might help if you're into that format.
The link with Columbus was indeed perpetrating a myth. You get this as recently as Ray Comfort's "Evidence Bible" which is filled with complete buffoonery in that it attempts to explain Columbus' motives based on his mention of Isaiah; YECs like Comfort link this to Isaiah 40:22 (again, with an incorrect reading of hûg). Columbus was motivated by his eschatology and the only reason he ever cited Isaiah was because of its dual function as prophetic-apocalyptic literature.
They were right on the way when the idea of popular astronomy (instead of only god-appointed people doing it) reached Europe, and yet they seem oblivious from it.
It's a really good reminder that even on the era of large empires, culture was still very fractally distributed.
This is a really good point. The ANE had its own idea of cosmology, Europe its, Asia its, etc. Even then, much of the biblical text contains polemics against Babylonian ideas (recall that cosmology, deity, and "function" are all tied together in their worldview).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_astronomy#:~:text....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_Map_of_the_World
This idea probably wasn't unique to the Babylonians, but this approximation of a disc-shaped Earth was fairly commonplace up to and including the Exhilic Period (biblical texts likely being influenced, at least in part, by the Babylonian views though much of the text is certainly constructed of polemic narratives).
> Isaiah 11:12: He will raise a signal for the nations and will assemble the banished of Israel, and gather the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.
Which clearly indicates some kind of quadrilateral, or perhaps a tetrahedron.
Regardless of shape, I think the most fundamental shift occurred with the idea that the Earth is not a center of the universe.
天圓地方 (literally: sky round, land square) was a serious core idea in ancient Chinese cosmology that was most popular 2000 years ago around the Han Dynasty period.
As for some serious pointers as you requested, here: https://ctext.org/lunheng/shuo-ri/zh
There's a couple paragraphs arguing that the sky isn't round (dome-like) but "flat" and parallel to the land because people have travelled and have never seen the sky merge with the land. (see the paras starting "實者、天不在地中，日亦不隨天隱，天平正，與地無異。")
You might say the ancient Chinese didn't care enough so they ended up with wrong conclusions (or parroted whatever was told to them by even more ancient sources that just made up its cosmology), but at any rate the Chinese definitely did believe in flat earth 2000 years ago, and we have very reliable records for that one.
It would be like saying, "It's a myth that in the 21st century, they were bunch of rubes who were unaware that every single object is exerting a gravitational force on them." Well, um, it's a myth that physics-educated people were unaware of this, sure. But most people have no reason to learn about this or be aware of it; it's not relevant to everyday life.
See also the religion-science conflict thesis, which was popularized by Draper and White:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis
> My guests today are David Hutchings and James C. Ungureanu, co-authors of Of Popes and Unicorns: Science, Christianity and How the Conflict Thesis Fooled the World. David is a physicist, science teacher and writer and James is a historian of science and religion. In this interview we discuss their book and the origin and impact of the Conflict Thesis - the pervasive but erroneous idea that religion and science have always been in conflict down the ages.
https://hti.osu.edu/sites/default/files/documents_in_the_cas...
"heresy" ... "that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world" ... "contrary to Holy Scripture"
More detailed:
"We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you, the said Galileo . . . have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy, that is, of having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that the sun is the center of the world, and that it does not move from east to west, and that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world; also, that an opinion can be held and supported as probable, after it has been declared and finally decreed contrary to the Holy Scripture".
Additionally, Galileo's and Copernicus' books were finally removed from the index of the banned books only in 1835, they were on the banned list for more than 200 years, since the 1616 Inquisition's judgment.
Context: Galileo was the first person to see with his own eyes with his first of the kind self-made telescope the moons that are today known as Galilean moons and recognized them as the satellites of Jupiter in March 1610. Which convinced him that the understanding of the church was wrong. The church sentenced him in 1633 to house arrest where he remained until his death in 1642.
Which was not evidence for heliocentrism.
In the early 1600s there were seven models floating around: Heraclidean (geo-heliocentric), Ptolemaic, Copernican (heliocentric, pure circles with lots of epicycles), Gilbertian, Tychonic, Ursine, Keplerian.
Newton, in his Principia (1687), did not use calculus to present his Universal Graviation: rather it was carefully structured in Aristotelian form, with axioms and deductive logic. Kepler's laws can be deduced from principles. Still no coriollis or parallax.
The first inkling of the Earth's motion comes in 1728 when James Bradley detects stellar aberration in γ-Draconis. In 1791 Giovanni Guglielmini finds a 4 mm Coriolis deflection over a 29 m drop, thus providing empirical evidence of rotation. In 1806 Giuseppi Calandrelli publishes "Ozzervatione e riflessione sulla paralasse annua dall’alfa della Lira," reporting parallax in α-Lyrae. So parallax, the chief evidence for the Earth's motion came 250+ years after Galileo.
Stellar parallax was considered since at least Aristotle, as he mentions in his On the Heavens (II.14), and since it is not observed then it is reasonable to conclude that there is no motion (it took several thousand years to develop instruments to actually measure it).
Galileo's chief problems were (a) he was an egotistical jackass, and (b) he had no evidence for what he was claiming to be true. He was allowed to put forward the Copernican model "suppositionally", i.e., as an hypothesis, and "not absolutely". The latter of which, (b), Galileo admitted in his first deposition (12 April 1633): it was concluded that his book put forward the idea 'absolutely', which is where his conviction comes from.
By the late 1600s most folks had switched over to the Keplerian model: not necessarily because they thought it was what was actually happening in reality, but probably because it made the math easier.
For a good timeline of events, see (recently late) Michael F. Flynn's "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown":
* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...
Daniel Whitten's "Matters of Faith and Morals Ex Suppositione" is also an interesting read.
Many useless claims which don't disprove that his sentence was literally because of:
"heresy" ... "that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world" ... "contrary to Holy Scripture"
And the church forbade his book as "heresy" for 200 years.
He was right. The church was wrong, directly referring to the effing "Holy Scripture" to support its claim and played fighting "heresy", keeping being wrong for 200 years afterwards. It's so clear.
Monkeys throwing darts can also (just happen to) be "right" when picking stocks that do well in the market. Galileo had as much evidence in believing Copernicus was right as the monkeys.
If he had simply stuck to simply arguing both sides of an hypothesis in his Dialogue, which he was asked to do by the pope in the first place, it would have saved everyone a lot of trouble. Heck, Kepler's stuff was already around for decades, and Galileo completely ignored it (along with Tycho):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogue_Concerning_the_Two_Ch...
If you want to argue 'for science' then Galileo is not a good example: the only thing he just happen to be right about was that the sun was the centre of things, whereas everything else in the Copernican system (including epicycles) was just as messy as in Ptolemy. There was no practical reason to switch systems, and no evidence to think it was correct.
At the end of the day the person who actually got things right was Kepler, and he kept plugging away at the problem because of this belief that the physical world reflected the spiritual realm (KGW XIII, letter 23, 35; 1595)
> In this way, then, the Sun, itself at rest in the middle and yet the fount of motion, carries the image of God the Father and creator. For what creation is to God, motion is to the Sun. Moreover, it moves [the planets] in a fixed place, as the Father creates in the Son. Unless the fixed stars offered a place, thanks to their motionlessness, no movement could exist. I defended this axiom while still in Tübingen. The Sun distributes motive virtue through the medium space, in which the planets are found: just as the Father creates by spirit or by the virtue of His spirit. And from the necessity of these presuppositions, it follows that motion is in proportion with distance.
See Kozhamthadam's "The Religious Foundations of Kepler's Science" and "Theological Foundations of Kepler's Astronomy" by Barker and Goldstein.
Going further, one needs to believe in certain metaphysical assumptions before you can even start doing what we know call science:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)#Provid...
There were plenty ideas floating around at the time, but ideas are cheap. Galileo certainly made important improvements to telescope technology, but his efforts in moving forward new models (specifically Copernican) were a dead end, and he made no practical difference to things: Kepler was already defending Copernicus in his Mysterium Cosmographicum (1e 1596), and put forward his laws in Astronomia nova (1609), a copy of which he sent to Galileo, which Galileo promptly ignored even two decades later when he published his Dialogue (1632).
The Earth was never the center around which the Sun rotated. Not in 1AD, not in 1600AD, not now.
If the church claimed that the "Holy Scripture" says that the Earth is in the center, the church was still wrong, and moreover, the "Holy Scripture" was wrong.
The church can't be right to claim "heresy" to somebody who was right then and is still right now.
It wan't even the case that the Pope (in person) was mad with Galileo for being used as a Simplicio caricature and figure of fun in his work.
All the data used came from church funded observatories and church backed astronomers, all the main ideas from both sides of the debate came from church funded theorists.
The crux of the dispute and the trial was pretty much that Galileo was a dedicated edgelord who had decades of pissing people off and making enemies on his ledger.
Think less about religion Vs science and more about maverick asshole vs. faction within giant bureaucracy.
Once Galileo had "insulted the Pope" the knives came out and his enemies struck, it was a pure show trial fueled by personal vindictiveness that came from being the target of savage biting insults.
- the church officially wrote that the Earth is the center
- that the Holy Scripture says so and
- whoever says differently is heretic
and the Earth was never the center.
The Catholic Church has changed its stance on many things through time, see [history].
In this instance the Church itself had officially requested a presentation be made to demonstrate various arguments for and against different viewpoints .. one of which was that the heavens didn't rotate about the earth.
It wasn't a surprise that such a well known hypothetical should appear in a book commissioned to outline such hypotheticals.
It was the pope that asked Galileo to write a book in the first place. The Church was so against the idea that… its leader asked a prominent natural philosopher to write about. The book had two imprimatur approvals.
> The Earth was never the center around which the Sun rotated. Not in 1AD, not in 1600AD, not now.
And there was no evidence to support this assertion until 1728 and Bradley with γ-Draconis, and with the first parallax report in 1806 and Calandrelli (a priest) with α-Lyrae/Vega (the actual value he calculated was wrong). It was not a new idea when Copernicus published his book in 1543, nor when Kepler defended it in 1596, nor when Galileo published his Dialgoue in 1623: Aristotle most famously considered it in ~300 BC and rejected it for lack of evidence. Anaxagoras (400s BC) and Aristarchus of Samos put forward heliocentrism.
Politics is a complex thing where people don't mean what they say, and their meaning change depending on who are listening, how, why and when.
Heliocentrism was discovered by a joint-enterprise of two enemy churches, and only became heresy post-facto when some very good evidence arrived. But by then it seemed to really become heresy, and was punished by itself. Almost certainly the Galileo's posture was important for that, but the society's context was way more important.
Anyway, you won't get any good conclusion if you insist on analyzing the politicians arguments on logic or expect coherence.
Those who judged Galileo were part of the Roman Inquisition.
Pope Urban's hands were tied when Galileo was seen to mock the pope and church through the figure and dialogue of Simplicio.
This is of course does not make the adjudication OK but you're going too far in the opposite direction.
The arguments made "by an idiot" were clear swipes at both Lodovico delle Colombe and Cesare Cremonini.
And other passages in other works of Galileo, but that alone is sufficiento sink "Evidence-free claim".
This has been batted back and forth since (at least) The Sleepwalkers (1959) by Arthur Koestler so you can argue against the assertaion but it's foolish to pretend there isn't reams of references on this going back decades.
All those references are in the class of this salt stuff in the OP. They're whole fiction.
The Our Fake History podcast had a two-part series on this:
* https://www.podcastone.com/episode/Episode-163--What-Was-The...
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-163-what-was-t...
* https://www.podcastone.com/episode/Episode-164--What-Was-The...
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-164-what-was-t...
Just go on social media today to see the same thing in action.
I started to think about it in depth when thinking about weed control in my own backyard - should I salt my own soil?
The I realized how quickly it would wash away in the next rain. And for ancient times, the sheer volume of salt one would need in order to disrupt a significant amount of land.
I dunno maybe it happened, but it seems like a very very dumb way to go about it. Then again, humans repeatedly prove the magnitude of our stupidity.
To summarize, salting an area was a real thing, but the evidence suggests that it was done to make the land more fertile and not less. The idea was to replace your enemy's city with weeds and greenery, as if it had never existed.
I don't know how this could be weaponized or if anyone ever made a serious attempt at it. But it's experienced as massive regional catastrophe when it does, and the cause is clear even if not understood. There are places in arizona and california where salt crystals visibly form on the surface of what used to be farmland: it's plausible this would have been seen in the irrigation agriculture societies of mesopotamia and the ancient eastern mediterranean. Certainly easy to make the jump to fantasizing/praying about it happening to your enemies, once you've seen or heard of it.
As much as you can prove a negative, this guys do it by never mentioning him, despite being at the right place and time, and writing about other religions and prophets.
Even the wikipedia entry on this subject starts with a huge logical phalacy.
And here I was hoarding all this salt, hoping for our return to the salt standard. :-(
Well ya can't win em all! And at least I'm not on a low sodium diet.