Destroying Cities
The custom of purifying or consecrating a destroyed city with salt and cursing anyone who dared to rebuild it was widespread in the ancient Near East, but historical accounts are unclear as to what the sowing of salt meant in that process.
Various Hittite and Assyrian texts speak of ceremonially strewing salt, minerals, or plants (weeds, "cress", or kudimmu, which are associated with salt and desolation) over destroyed cities, including Hattusa, Taidu, Arinna, Hunusa, Irridu, and Susa. The Book of Judges (9:45) says that Abimelech, the judge of the Israelites, sowed his own capital, Shechem, with salt, ca. 1050 BC, after quelling a revolt against him. This may have been part of a ḥērem ritual. (cf. Salt in the Bible)
Starting in the 19th century, various texts claim that the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus Africanus plowed over and sowed the city of Carthage with salt after defeating it in the Third Punic War (146 BC), sacking it, and forcing the survivors into slavery. However, no ancient sources exist documenting this. The Carthage story is a later invention, probably modelled on the story of Shechem. The ritual of symbolically drawing a plow over the site of a city is, however, mentioned in ancient sources, though not in reference to Carthage specifically.
When Pope Boniface VIII destroyed Palestrina in 1299, he ordered it plowed "following the old example of Carthage in Africa", and also salted. "I have run the plough over it, like the ancient Carthage of Africa, and I have had salt sown upon it...." The text is not clear as to whether he thought Carthage was salted. Later accounts of other destructions of medieval Italian cities are now rejected as unhistorical: Padua by Attila (452)--perhaps in a parallel between Attila and the ancient Assyrians; Milan by Frederick Barbarossa (1162); and Semifonte by the Florentines (1202).
The English epic poem Siege of Jerusalem (ca. 1370) recounts that Titus commanded the sowing of salt on the Temple, but this episode is not found in Josephus.
Read more about this topic: Salting The Earth
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