请输入您要查询的百科知识:

 

词条 Salting the earth
释义

  1. Destroying cities

  2. Punishing traitors

  3. Legends

  4. See also

  5. Footnotes and references

  6. Bibliography

{{distinguish|Salt of the earth (disambiguation){{!}}Salt of the earth|Salting (confidence trick)}}{{about|the symbolic practice|salt in the soil|Soil salinity}}{{for|Wikipedia's page creation protection|Wikipedia:SALT|selfref=yes}}

Salting the earth, or sowing with salt, is the ritual of spreading salt on conquered cities to symbolize a curse on their re-inhabitation.[1][2] It originated as a symbolic practice in the ancient Near East and became a well-established folkloric motif in the Middle Ages.[3] Contrary to popular belief, using salt in this way would not have been a practical method of rendering an area unfit for crop production due to the very large quantity of salt required.

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.{{cn|date=November 2018|reason=wikipedians themselves cannot claim something is unknown; you need a ref whaichsays this}}

Various Hittite and Assyrian texts speak of ceremonially strewing salt, minerals, or plants (weeds, "cress", or kudimmu, which are associated with salt and desolation[4]) over destroyed cities, including Hattusa, Taidu, Arinna, Hunusa,[2] Irridu,[5] and Susa.[6] The Book of Judges (9:45) says that Abimelech, the judge of the Israelites, sowed his own capital, Shechem, with salt, c. 1050 BC, after quelling a revolt against him. This may have been part of a ḥērem ritual[2] (see Salt in the Bible).

Starting in the 19th century,[7] 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 enslaving the survivors. Though ancient sources do mention symbolically drawing a plow over various cities, and salting them, none mention Carthage in particular.[8] The Carthage story is a later invention, probably modeled on the story of Shechem.[9]

When Pope Boniface VIII destroyed Palestrina in 1299, he ordered that it be plowed "following the old example of Carthage in Africa", and also salted.[10] "I have run the plough over it, like the ancient Carthage of Africa, and I have had salt sown upon it...."[11] The text is not clear as to whether he thought Carthage was salted. Later accounts of other saltings in the 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).[12]

The English epic poem Siege of Jerusalem (c. 1370) recounts that Titus commanded the sowing of salt on the Temple,[13] but this episode is not found in Josephus.

Punishing traitors

In Spain and the Spanish Empire, salt was poured onto the land owned by a convicted traitor (often one who was executed and their head placed on a picota, or pike, afterwards) after their house was demolished.

This was done in Portugal as well. The last known event of this sort was the destruction of the Duke of Aveiro's palace in Lisbon in 1759, due to his participation in the Távora affair (a conspiracy against King Joseph I of Portugal). His palace was demolished and his land was salted.[14] A stone memorial now perpetuates the memory of the shame of the Duke, where it is written:

In this place were put to the ground and salted the houses of José Mascarenhas, stripped of the honours of Duque de Aveiro and others.... Put to Justice as one of the leaders of the most barbarous and execrable upheaval that... was committed against the most royal and sacred person of the Lord Joseph I. In this infamous land nothing may be built for all time.

In the Portuguese colony of Brazil, the leader of the Inconfidência Mineira, Tiradentes, was sentenced to death and his house was "razed and salted, so that never again be built up on the floor, ... and even the floor will rise up a standard by which the memory is preserved (preserving) the infamy of this heinous offender..."[15] He suffered further indignities, being hanged and quartered, his body parts carried to various parts of the country where his fellow revolutionaries had met, and his children deprived of their property and honor.[15][16][17][18]

Legends

An ancient legend says that Odysseus feigned madness by yoking a horse and an ox to his plow and sowing salt.[19]

See also

  • Soil salinity
  • Salted bomb
  • "Salt of the earth", a metaphor that is part of a discourse on salt and light

Footnotes and references

1. ^Ridley, 1986, p. 144.
2. ^Gevirtz, 1963.
3. ^Stevens, 1988.
4. ^Weinfeld, Moshe. Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School, 1992, {{ISBN|0-931464-40-4}}, [https://books.google.com/books?id=7vSnbQKLyCYC&pg=PA110&dq=kudimmu p. 110]
5. ^Chavalas, Mark. The ancient Near East: historical sources in translation pp. 144-5.
6. ^Persians: Masters of Empire, by the editors of Time-Life Books. Alexandria, Va.: Time-Life Books, 1995. {{ISBN|0-8094-9104-4}} pp. 7-8.
7. ^{{cite book |author= Ripley, George |authorlink= George Ripley (transcendentalist) |author2=Charles Anderson Dana |title= The New American Cyclopædia: a Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge |volume=4 |page=39 |year= 1863 |url= https://archive.org/stream/americancyclopae04ripl#page/38/mode/2up}}
8. ^Stevens, 1988, pp. 39-40.
9. ^Ridley, 1986
10. ^Warmington, 1988
11. ^{{cite book |author=Sedgwick, Henry Dwight |authorlink= Henry Dwight Sedgwick |title=Italy In The Thirteenth Century, Part Two |year=2005 |publisher=Kessinger Publishing, LLC |page=324 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=iAogBss02bIC |isbn=978-1-4179-6638-7 }}
12. ^{{cite journal |jstor=2855837 |pages=429–450 |last1=Oerter |first1=H. L. |title=Campaldino, 1289 |volume=43 |issue=3 |journal=Speculum |year=1968 |doi=10.2307/2855837}}
13. ^Hanna, Ralph and David Lawton, eds., The Siege of Jerusalem, 2003, [https://books.google.com/books?id=N_Ia3C6eMzgC&pg=PA88 line 1295]
14. ^Joseph Hughes, An authentick letter from Mr. Hughes, a Gentleman residing at Lisbon..., London 1759, [https://books.google.com/books?id=hmNZAAAAcAAJ&q=salt p. 25]
15. ^{{cite wikisource |title=Sentença proferida contra os réus do levante e conjuração de Minas Gerais |wslink=pt:Sentença proferida contra os réus do levante e conjuração de Minas Gerais |year=1789 |location=Brazil |language=Portuguese}}
16. ^{{cite book |last= Southey |first= Robert |authorlink= Robert Southey |title= History of Brazil |volume= 3 |location= London |publisher= Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown |year= 1819 |page= 684}}
17. ^{{cite book |last= Worcester |first= Donald E. |title= Brazil, From Colony to World Power |location= New York |publisher= Scribner |year= 1973 |page= 52 |isbn= 0-684-13386-5}}
18. ^{{cite book |last= Bishop |first= Elizabeth |title= Brazil |location= New York |publisher= Time |year= 1962 |page= 31}}
19. ^The story does not appear in Homer, but was apparently mentioned in Sophocles' lost tragedy The Mad Ulysses: James George Frazer, ed., Apollodorus: The Library, II:[https://books.google.com/books?id=hDhgAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA177&dq=sowed%20salt 176 footnote 2]; Hyginus, Fabulae 95 mentions the mismatched animals but not the salt.

Bibliography

  • {{cite journal|title=Jericho and Shechem: A Religio-Literary Aspect of City Destruction|last1=Gevirtz|first1=Stanley Gevirtz|journal=Vetus Testamentum|volume=13|issue=Fasc. 1|year=1963|pages=52–62|jstor=1516752}}
  • {{cite journal|last1=Ridley|first1=R.T.|title=To Be Taken with a Pinch of Salt: The Destruction of Carthage|journal=Classical Philology|volume=81|issue=2|year=1986|jstor=269786|pages=140–146|doi=10.1086/366973}}
  • {{cite journal |last1=Stevens|first1=Susan T.| title=A Legend of the Destruction of Carthage|journal=Classical Philology |volume=83 |issue=1 |pages=39–41| year=1988|jstor=269635 |doi=10.1086/367078}}
  • {{cite journal |last1=Visona |first1=Paolo |year=1988 |title=On the Destruction of Carthage Again |journal=Classical Philology |volume=83 |issue=1 |pages=41–42|jstor=269636 |doi=10.1086/367079}}
  • {{cite journal |last1=Warmington |first1=B.H. |title=The Destruction of Carthage: A Retractatio|journal=Classical Philology |volume=83 |issue=4 |pages=308–310|year=1988| jstor=269510 |doi=10.1086/367123}}
{{Salt topics}}

5 : Rituals|Aftermath of war|History of salt|Ancient Near East|Judaism and warfare

随便看

 

开放百科全书收录14589846条英语、德语、日语等多语种百科知识,基本涵盖了大多数领域的百科知识,是一部内容自由、开放的电子版国际百科全书。

 

Copyright © 2023 OENC.NET All Rights Reserved
京ICP备2021023879号 更新时间:2024/11/15 23:14:13